Why Juicero Really Failed: The $120 Million Startup Mistake Nobody Talks About
In 2016, a startup convinced some of the world’s sharpest venture capitalists to pour $120 million into a Wi-Fi-connected juicer. Seventeen months later, every last cent had been lost. What happened inside those seventeen months is one of the most instructive failure stories in modern business history.
What was the Juicero machine?
Juicero was founded in 2013 in San Francisco by Doug Evans, a raw-food enthusiast and former chief executive of Organic Avenue, a juice bar chain based in New York. His ambition was to bring cold-pressed juice into every household through a countertop appliance that made the process fast, clean, and foolproof.
The product that eventually emerged was the Juicero Press, a sleek machine that sat on your kitchen counter, connected to your home Wi-Fi, and squeezed proprietary single-serve pouches of pre-cut fruits and vegetables into a glass of fresh juice.
Each pouch carried a QR code, which the machine scanned and verified against a live internet connection before it would operate. Without a verified pouch and an active connection, the machine refused to function at all.
When the Juicero Press launched publicly in April 2016, it was priced at $699. A subscription to the produce packs cost between $5 and $8 per pouch.
Evans described the machine as a revolution in home nutrition and regularly compared his vision to that of Steve Jobs. For a moment, many people in Silicon Valley believed him (Waters, 2024).
| $120M | 17 | $399 |
| Total investment raised before collapse | Months from launch to complete shutdown | Reduced price after poor initial sales |
How it raised $120 million?
Before a single unit reached a consumer home, Juicero had already secured backing from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and a collection of other respected venture capital firms. The total raised exceeded $120 million, placing it among the most generously funded food technology startups of its generation.
The fundraising success was driven in large part by founder charisma. Evans had a compelling personal story, an infectious belief in his product, and the ability to frame Juicero as something far bigger than a kitchen appliance.
He pitched it as a platform, a system that connected consumers directly to farms, and the investors who heard that pitch found it persuasive. The promise of a recurring subscription revenue model, modelled loosely on the Keurig approach, added financial appeal on top of the narrative excitement (VC Factory, 2025).
What nobody asked loudly enough at the time was whether ordinary consumers shared that excitement, and whether they would agree to pay $700 to find out.
The Five reasons Juicero Failed
1) The price excluded the people it needed most
A $699 machine with a mandatory subscription is not a product for the mass market. Even after the company reduced the price to $399, it remained far beyond what most health-conscious households were willing to spend on a single-function appliance.
The total annual cost, once juice packs were factored in, ran into hundreds of additional dollars. The Keurig comparison Evans relied upon actually highlighted the problem rather than solved it.
Keurig succeeded because both the hardware and the consumables sat within an affordable range. Juicero replicated the business model without replicating the accessibility (Productmint, 2022).
2) The engineering served the product, not the user
The Juicero Press was built to impress, and it succeeded at that. It contained dozens of custom components, a high-torque pressing mechanism, and technology refined to a degree far exceeding anything the task demanded.
One internal polymer used for the white-coloured parts reportedly went through eight separate design revisions before the team approved it.
The mandatory Wi-Fi connection added a layer of fragility that made no logical sense to consumers. If the internet went down, so did breakfast (Manufacturing Hub, 2023).
Over-engineering is not the same as quality. When complexity adds cost and friction without adding user value, it is simply waste dressed up in technical language.
3) It solved a problem that barely existed
Cold-pressed juice was already available in most urban supermarkets. Conventional juicers produced comparable results at a fraction of the price and with no ongoing commitment.
Juicero’s convenience advantage over existing alternatives was genuinely marginal, and the premium it charged for that margin was anything but.
The company entered a crowded market without a reason compelling enough to change consumer behaviour at the price point it required (Codemotion, 2024).
4) Consumer research was an afterthought
There is little evidence that Juicero rigorously tested real purchasing intent before locking in its design and pricing. At the core of the company’s collapse was a failure to understand who the target customer actually was, what they were willing to spend, and what alternatives they already had access to.
Had those questions been answered honestly in the early stages, the product would almost certainly have looked very different by the time it reached shelves (Manufacturing Hub, 2023).
5) The wrong market was chosen from the start
Juicero positioned itself as a consumer home product from day one, which placed it in direct competition with cheap, reliable, and widely trusted alternatives. A commercial strategy targeting offices, hotel lobbies, gyms, and wellness spaces would have offered a far more receptive audience.
In those environments, premium pricing is more acceptable, usage is higher, and the convenience story holds up far better. That opportunity was never seriously pursued (Cognitive Market Research, 2025).
“Funding is not validation. $120 million tells you investors believed in the story. It tells you nothing about whether consumers will believe in the product.”
The Bloomberg test that ended everything
On April 19, 2017, Bloomberg ran an investigation that changed everything. Journalists had purchased Juicero’s proprietary juice packs and found that squeezing them firmly by hand produced virtually the same result as the $400 machine, in roughly the same time. The story spread across the internet within hours.
The public response was swift and unsparing. Juicero became the subject of parody videos, newspaper editorials, and widespread mockery.
It was held up as the clearest possible illustration of a particular Silicon Valley tendency: spending enormous sums of money and intellectual energy solving problems that do not exist for people who were never asking for help.
Juicero’s response made things worse. The company defended the machine by citing food safety concerns around hand-squeezing and suggested that customers who tried it were being opportunistic.
Existing investors who had been considering further funding declined to proceed, and the company ran out of money by May 2017 (Startupik, 2026).
By September 1, 2017, the company announced it was ceasing operations immediately. The board sought a buyer for the intellectual property and found none.
Co-founder Evans had quietly resigned from the board the previous week. Four days after the shutdown announcement, he was photographed at the Burning Man festival. For his critics, it was an entirely fitting final image.
How the product development process should have worked
Juicero’s failure was not random bad luck. It was the predictable outcome of a development process that skipped the most important questions. Each of the following changes would have materially improved the company’s chances.
a) Validate before building
Test real price points with real consumers before investing in hardware. Interest in a concept is not the same as readiness to pay for it.
b) Cut features that serve nobody
Wi-Fi, QR scanning, and internet verification added cost and friction with zero consumer benefit. Removing them would have lowered the price and simplified the experience.
c) Price for accessibility
A product targeting the mass consumer market must be priced within reach of that market. Aspirational pricing requires an aspirational reason to buy.
d) Start in commercial settings
Offices, gyms, and hotels offer higher willingness to pay, more frequent use, and a far more defensible value proposition for a premium juicing product.
Final thoughts
The story of Juicero has been told many times, usually as a punchline. That framing undersells its usefulness. The real lesson is not that the product was absurd, though parts of it were.
The real lesson is that intelligence, talent, and capital are not substitutes for honest market research and genuine consumer empathy.
Juicero knew how to raise money, hire engineers, and generate press coverage. What it never learned to do was ask its customers, directly and without assumption, whether they actually wanted what it was building at the price it needed to charge. That gap between founder vision and consumer reality is where the $120 million went.
Every product team building something new faces the same temptation Juicero gave in to: the temptation to believe that a compelling story is the same as a compelling product. It never is. The market has a way of making that clear, and it rarely waits long to do so (Soni, 2023).
References
Codemotion. (2024, December 30). The downfall of Juicero: The overhyped high-tech juicer. codemotion.com
Cognitive Market Research. (2025). Juicero: A case study in misunderstanding market demand. cognitivemarketresearch.com
Manufacturing Hub. (2023, August 7). Why this hardware startup failed after raising $100 million in funding. manufacturinghub.io
Productmint. (2022, December 16). What happened to Juicero? Here is why it failed. productmint.com
Reilly, C. (2018, September 1). Juicero is still the greatest example of Silicon Valley stupidity. CNET. cnet.com
Soni, R. (2023, July 20). From $120M to zero: An in-depth analysis of Juicero’s catastrophic collapse. LinkedIn. linkedin.com
Startupik. (2026, March 9). Why Juicero failed: The $400 juicer startup that became a Silicon Valley joke. startupik.com
VC Factory. (2025, June 25). Juicero: How founder charisma and VC projection bias led to a $120 million failure. thevcfactory.com
Waters, B. (2024, May 10). Juicero: A story of startup failure. Medium / The Launch Path. medium.com
MBA,BBA.
I am Smirti Bam, an enthusiastic edu blogger with a passion for sharing insights into the dynamic world of business and management through this website.
I hold a MBA degree from Presidential Business School, Kathmandu, and a BBA degree with a specialization in Finance from Apex College,
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