This interview is with Doug Evans, the Founder of Juicero. We interviewed Doug for the Smart Kitchen Show podcast. You can hear Doug’s interview here.
This Conversation Series interview is condensed and slightly edited for readability. You can read the full interview transcript here.
Michael Wolf: What is the Juicero?
Doug Evans: First it’s a software platform. The platform tracks the produce from the farm all the way through the Juicero press and provides visibility and transparency into the ingredients, into the source of the farm, into the nutrition, when it was created and when it expires. We built this software platform that connects to our financial planning system as well as into the cloud, into our website, and mobile and Android and iOS, so we have a full software system that actually comes with the Juicero press.
It’s also hardware, which is literally one part iPhone and one part Tesla roadster. It is a consumer device that has industrial strength and capability, all designed to extract the juice or the nectar from fresh, ripe, raw organic fruits and vegetables. Those fruits and vegetables actually come in the form of a pack, so we actually have in the Los Angeles region 110,000 square foot refrigerated LEED Gold-certified processing facility where we receive produce from the farm.
Michael Wolf: How do the packs work?
The vision is not to store inventory produce but to take the e-commerce orders and then reach out to our 14 farm partners, source the produce, have it transported to us on refrigerated trucks, and then inside our facility, we triple wash them, chop them, mix them, and put them into these packs. The packs have allowed design in engineering and their packaging a very unique QR code put on them, and that QR code can be read by an iPhone or an Android and the pack also gets read automatically by a scanner inside of the Juicero Press.
Michael Wolf: You created an entire fresh pressed juice value chain ecosystem all the way from sourcing to processing to the press. Was there any other way to do? You feel like you had to do this entire I guess delivery system and press.