The Juicero scandal remains one of the most talked-about startup failures in Silicon Valley history. In 2016, this company raised $120 million from some of the biggest names in venture capital — including Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins — to sell a juicer. Not just any juicer, though. This one cost $399, connected to Wi-Fi, scanned a QR code on proprietary juice packets, and pressed them with four tons of force to extract the juice inside.
For a while, it looked like just another quirky Silicon Valley success story. Then, in April 2017, Bloomberg published a report that changed everything.
The Discovery That Broke the Internet
Bloomberg reporters bought a Juicero machine, along with its packets of pre-chopped fruits and vegetables, and decided to test something simple: what happens if you just squeeze the packet with your hands instead of using the $399 machine?
It worked. Not only did it work, it produced juice almost as fast as the machine did — and without needing Wi-Fi, an app, or four tons of hydraulic pressure.
The story spread fast. Within days, “Juicero” became shorthand for wasteful startup excess — a symbol of investors throwing huge sums of money at a problem that never really needed solving in the first place.
Why Investors Missed the Obvious
Looking back, the appeal wasn’t really about juice. Juicero was pitched as an IoT (Internet of Things) company — the juicer was the hardware, but the real business model was the subscription: customers had to keep buying proprietary juice packets, since the machine wouldn’t process anything else. It followed the same logic as inkjet printers, where the printer is cheap but the ink is where the money is made.
Investors bought into the vision of a recurring-revenue hardware ecosystem, not a $400 juice squeezer. But the actual product — a giant countertop machine to do something achievable by hand — was hard to defend once regular people saw it laid out plainly.
The Fallout
The Bloomberg video humiliated the company publicly, and within months, Juicero’s reputation was damaged beyond recovery. By September 2017 — just five months after the story broke — Juicero shut down completely, refunding customers and laying off its entire staff.
The company had raised $120 million and lasted less than two years after its public launch.
What the Juicero Scandal Became a Symbol Of
Nearly a decade later, the Juicero scandal is still referenced as a cautionary tale in startup and venture capital circles. It’s frequently brought up in conversations about:
- Venture capital enthusiasm overriding basic product logic
- Startups solving problems that don’t exist
- The gap between “sounds innovative” and “is actually useful”
It sits alongside stories like Theranos and Fyre Festival in the canon of 2010s startup excess — except unlike those, no one was defrauded or hurt. Juicero’s downfall was purely about a product that made no practical sense once people saw the alternative.
