The year 2016 will be remembered as an inflection point in American culture and politics, forever synonymous with the election of Donald Trump—an annus horribilis in which the country suddenly seemed to lose its mind. The evidence, in retrospect, was all around us: Silicon Valley produced a start-up that lets busy entrepreneurs buy their significant others’ affection. Suicide Squad won an Oscar. A U.S. Olympic swimmer lied about getting mugged in Brazil. A “FitBit for dogs” start-up was acquired for more than $100 million. People began reporting clown sightings across the United States. A dead gorilla became a viral media sensation. Donald Trump was elected president. Perhaps most perturbing, the Bay Area’s venture-capital class was briefly consumed by lust for Juicero, a Wi-Fi-enabled juicer described as a “Keurig for juice” and heavily funded by a group of elite Silicon Valley investors—including Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Thrive Capital—to the tune of $120 million. David Krane, a partner at Google Ventures, called Juicero “the most complicated business that I’ve ever funded.”
To be perfectly clear: Juicero is a juicer, like any you’d see in a Bed Bath & Beyond; it works by pressing fresh fruit and vegetable juice cartridges, which sell for $5 to $7 apiece on Juicero’s smartphone app. Or it was a juicer, anyway: On Friday, Fortune broke the news that the maker of the $400 juicer (originally $700, before a price cut last year) is shutting down. Juicero is stopping operations and suspending the sale of both its fruit-and-veggie juice packs and its machines “immediately,” Fortune reports. The writing was on the wall: in July, Juicero had announced plans to lay off a quarter of its staff and find ways to reduce its prices. Juicero’s prices were “not a realistic way for us to fulfill our mission at the scale to which we aspire,” C.E.O. Jeff Dunn wrote in a letter to employees.
The turning point for Juicero seemed to have been a particularly damning Bloomberg report, earlier this year, which revealed that Juicero’s proprietary juice product—which the Juicero machine extracts by exerting four tons of force—could just as easily be squeezed by hand, with no discernible difference in quality.
Founder Doug Evans had compared Juicero’s research and development to Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster. He said he wanted to do for juicers what Steve Jobs did for computers. Instead, his company is now seeking a buyer. A letter posted on the Juicero Web site tells customers that they have 90 days to request a refund. Employees are being given 60 days’ notice.
Juicero was, in many ways, an apt metaphor for the absurdity of Silicon Valley. It represented a needlessly utopian vision from a founder seeking to reinvent an industry that probably didn’t need to be reinvented; the euphoria of a naval-gazing venture-capital class obsessed with the Next Big Thing; and the optimism and excess that define so many failed start-ups. For now, it would seem that Evans’s dream of disrupting the juicing industry will remain unrealized. At least we’ll always have this:
