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Juicero admits its juicer is still too expensive, even after a $300 price cut

Juicero admits its juicer is still too expensive, even after a $300 price cut

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It’s reportedly cutting staff, too

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Juicero juicer
Photo: Juicero

Juicero, the Silicon Valley equivalent of an overturned truck full of slime eels, has apparently started to recognize its mistakes. According to Fortune, Juicero’s newish CEO, Jeff Dunn, emailed employees about making a “strategic shift” to lower-cost machines and juice packets. “The current prices of $399 for the Press and $5 - $7 for produce Packs are not a realistic way for us to fulfill our mission at the scale to which we aspire,” he reportedly wrote.

Fortune says that Juicero is aiming for its second-generation juicer to cost around $200 — or about $500 less than the company’s high-end juicer was originally sold for. Juicero cut the machine’s price to $400 back in January, after Dunn, a former Coke executive, took over from Juicero founder Doug Evans, but evidently the company is aware that it’s still too expensive at that price.

Juicero’s plan has clearly not worked

In addition to the pricing news, Fortune also reports that Juciero announced layoffs, with 25 percent of its staff being cut. Most of those layoffs come from sales and marketing, the article says.

There’s no detail on when Juicero plans to release a new juicer or rework the pricing on its juice packs. But the dramatic changes show just how wildly the company’s initial plan has failed. Juicero launched its Wi-Fi-connected juicer for $700 last spring to an immediately skeptical public. The product didn’t function without an internet connection and was only capable of making juice out of pre-chopped packages of fruits and vegetables, which mostly hovered around $7 a glass. The product became even more of a laughingstock after Bloomberg realized the packets could be squeezed by hand — meaning the $700 juicer wasn’t even necessary.