Like many health-conscious consumers, Doug Evans enjoys a freshly made glass of juice in the morning. But Evans, the former CEO of cold-pressed juice chain Organic Avenue, is intimately familiar with the challenges that come with making — and selling — fresh juice.
Speaking at BevNET Live Winter 2016, held in Santa Monica, Calif, Evans presented the story behind his latest venture: Juicero. A high-tech system designed to simplify at-home juicing, Juicero’s countertop machine uses four tons of force to cold press proprietary, vacuum-sealed bags of organic fruit and vegetables. Juicing is easy: load a bag into the unit, press a button and wait about four minutes. The result is an extremely fresh and high quality juice with nearly no clean up.
The simple process was born out of much more complex one that took a lot of thought, time and money.
“To create a piece of hardware of the level that we do at Juicero, it’s like $50 million,” Evans said. “And I don’t want to make flippant decisions. So we’re working on version 1.5, version 2.0, version 2.0 consumer, version 2.0 corporate. There’s a whole software world I want to work on.”
Evans sought out mechanical engineers to help design his machine, a slick looking gadget that’s visually nothing like a traditional juicer. It also comes with a much higher price: $699 for the machine and $4-10 for each pack. However, once he had his juicer, Evans believed the easy part was done. Speaking to the audience, he said the hard part was figuring out how to supply the organic produce and ensure that it would remain fresh in sealed packages without adding preservatives.
To do this, Juicero built a massive production facility that processes and packages organic produce for use with the juicer. Juicero tracks the entire supply chain of its produce and packets via QR codes stamped on each bag. The juicers read the bag code and are equipped with a remote kill switch, so in the event of a recall the company can shut down the machines to prevent consumers from any potential foodborne illnesses.
“Once you put produce in the bag, you really don’t have the sniff test,” Evans said. “Like when you have Chinese food in the refrigerator and you want to know if it’s fresh you can stick your nose in it. You can’t do that once it’s in the bag.”
But the machine’s connectedness to the Juicero company doesn’t just stop at emergency shutdowns. Juicero can also track customer consumption, the time of day the machines are used and find out more about when customers will be ready to re-order.
Since June, Evans said that the company has seen exponential growth month-by-month in the number of packages shipped per day.
“The media loved the clickbait of saying ‘$700 juicer,’” Evans said. “But the people who have it are consuming it, and they want more.”
As for Juicero’s future, Evans said that the company is just getting started. Comparing Juicero to the history of another innovative tech company, Evans said the current model of Juicero on the market is where Apple was with its 1984 Macintosh.
“If you were to think about where we are, we went through a dozen iterations of Juicero before we launched,” he said. “And every single one of them was sellable to the market. But they weren’t as refined. So what we launched was pretty comprehensive and mature. But it’s scratching the surface because there’s a lot of feedback about what we can do in the next generation.”