Bad Press on Bad Press Leads to Juicero Refunds

Those who prefer to squeeze juice with their bare hands can get their $400 back
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 21, 2017 9:08 AM CDT
Juicero Offering Refunds for Its Bag-Squeezing Machine
Juicero's "Happiness Guarantee" means you can get your money back.   (Twitter)

The company that once hawked a product vying to be "the most technologically advanced thing in the kitchen" is now offering refunds for the uber-appliance, Fortune reports. The $400 Juicero machine, a WiFi-enabled juicer billed as the "Keurig of juicers," received $120 million in startup funds, but a Bloomberg report this week turned it all a bit sour when it revealed a person's bare hands could squeeze a cup of juice out of the accompanying juice packets just as quickly as the machine itself—sometimes even faster. Juicero CEO Jeff Dunn put up a Medium post Thursday announcing the company is extending its "Happiness Guarantee" and letting customers new and old send their presses back for the next 30 days for a full refund.

Dunn notes it's "never easy" to endure the bad press like that the Juicero has received after the Bloomberg report, but he adds the company is "learning, listening, and improving" and wants to keep helping "people on their journey to health." And that press has indeed been brutal, with Forbes calling it a "non-product" that needs to be "squeezed out of existence," Quartz saying startup firms like this are "incapable of seeing their own absurdities," and Men's Health sniffing that it knew the juicer was useless a month back—which is why it crushed the device with a Ford Raptor. Still, Dunn points to the "mediocre" and possibly messy results one would get by extracting juice with one's hands. But in comments to Gizmodo, one of Bloomberg's squeezers counters that, saying she "simply applied light pressure to the bag and the juice poured out." (More juice stories.)

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