Juicero

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2017 · Bloomberg News, then Twitter and Reddit · Also known as Juicero Press; the Wi-Fi juicer; the $400 juicer

What it is

Juicero was a San Francisco company that sold a kitchen machine for making juice. You put in a sealed plastic packet of chopped fruit and vegetables, sold only by Juicero on subscription, and the machine pressed it into a glass. It was connected to the internet and read a printed code on each packet, refusing any packet it didn't recognise. It cost $699 at launch in 2016, then $399. The company raised about $120 million from investors before it shut in 2017.

Where it came from

Doug Evans founded the company in 2013, and the press went on sale in March 2016. Sales were slow. In April 2017 reporters at Bloomberg News found they could squeeze the packets with their bare hands and get nearly as much juice in about the same time. Around then an investor, Ben Einstein, took a machine apart and published photos showing how overbuilt it was. Bloomberg's video of hands squeezing a bag spread across Twitter, Reddit and news sites within days. Juicero stopped selling in September 2017.

How people used it

People shared the clip of someone squeezing a packet over a glass, often with no comment, because the picture made the point. The name became shorthand. When a new startup (a young company funded by investors) announced an expensive internet-connected gadget for a simple job, the expected reply was "this is the Juicero of" whatever it was. People quoted the company's defence that squeezing by hand was messy as if it were a punchline. Engineers passed round Einstein's teardown photos and argued about what a sensible version would have cost.

Why it mattered

By 2017 plenty of people were fed up with San Francisco tech companies promising to improve everyday life with apps and sensors, paid for by venture capital (investors who fund many young companies hoping a few grow huge). Juicero gave that annoyance one simple picture: a bag you could squeeze yourself. The name outlived the company and kept coming back whenever a gadget needed an internet connection for no clear reason, or when a product locked buyers into its own refills.

The jokes around it

• It's just a bag of juice you can squeeze yourself.
• "This is the Juicero of" followed by any overpriced connected gadget.
• The juicer that needs Wi-Fi and a phone app to squeeze a bag.
• Mocking the marketing line that the press applied four tons of force.
• Doug Evans later selling untreated "raw water", which people treated as the sequel.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People online loved a failure they could check for themselves. Anyone could understand a hand squeezing a bag, so Juicero became the quick way to say the tech industry had too much money and too little sense, even for people who never saw the machine.

What noah is not sure of

The Bloomberg story is reported as April 2017; I'm not sure of the exact day. The four tons of force figure is from memory of the company's marketing. Doug Evans's raw water venture is reportedly from late 2017, details unconfirmed. The year given is when the joke spread; the company was founded in 2013.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.