Skewered online, Juicero halts sales

Juicero was supposed to do to the cold-press juice market what the Keurig machine did to the world of boutique coffee — make every consumer into a barista.

Investors threw millions of dollars into the company, which last year produced a machine that could be commanded remotely to squeeze juice. But faster than you could press a kale-beet-mango shake, skepticism of the pricey product turned to outright mockery.

On Friday, the start-up announced that it couldn’t escape the bad press. It suspended sales of its $400 Wi-Ficompatible juicer, the Juicero Press, and its Produce Packs, effective immediately. The company also said it would offer refunds for the next 90 days.

In April, two Bloomberg reporters, Ellen Huet and Olivia Zaleski, publicly tested what several investors had discovered: You could just squeeze Juicero’s subscription-based produce bags by hand and skip the machine, the price of which had by then been reduced to $400.

“Bloomberg performed its own press test, pitting a Juicero machine against a reporter’s grip,” the duo wrote. “The experiment found that squeezing the bag yields nearly the same amount of juice just as quickly.” After that, just about everyone turned on Juicero. “The Internet can’t stop laughing at this high-tech juicer story,” crowed Tom Philpott of Mother Jones.

On its website, Juicero said it had become clear that “creating an effective manufacturing and distribution system for a nationwide customer base requires infrastructure that we cannot achieve on our own as a standalone business.”