Doug Evans: After I left Organic Avenue and I wanted to figure out what I was going to do next because I was very hungry and very thirsty, I found a real gap in the market that the quality of juice that I was accustomed to, which was coming right off of a press I could literally in my prior organic kitchen, I could gulp with a glass and that cold press juice pour right into the glass, and I was able to drink it. When I got home, I was wondering like where am I going to get my juice. I looked at the options on the Internet, on Amazon, and Bed Bath & Beyond, and Williams-Sonoma. Basically, all the juicers that were available were using either augers or gears or centrifuges, and they operate at different speeds but fundamentally they were all copies of the same design.
But what I knew from my actual 10 years of Organic Avenue was I learned about cold presses, and all the big juice companies use cold presses. Starbucks, Evolution Fresh. Organic Avenue used cold presses and so I knew the difference between the industrial, commercial juice presses and the consumer ones that were made available via retail. I just saw a big gap. Similar to the spirit of what Apple did with taking the mainframe computer and creating the personal computer, I looked at was it possible to take a mainframe juice press and create a personal juice press, with some of the attributes that makes it easy to clean and making it small so it fits on a kitchen countertop. That was my original design intention.
I was able to cobble together a prototype and we took fresh produce and we chopped it, and sliced it and grated it and wrapped it in cheesecloth and put it in the early prototype and turned it on. Lo and behold, I was able to press the juice out of the produce. That’s what I actually brought to Silicon Valley was a very crude prototype, but the design and my design intention allowed me to make five juices in 5 minutes with no setup and no cleanup. The end product was this new type of juice.
Michael Wolf: The price point is $700. Do you see that coming down?
Doug Evans: I think the price will definitely come down as we kind of optimize and shift and move way from CMC metal parts to forged and casted parts. The cost will be able to come down as we get to scale. This is the first product. We had to really make sure that it was safe. Almost every tolerance is overbuilt to beyond safety parts, so it’s a very comprehensive safe design. As we can do statistically significant wear tests over time, we can see where we might be able to make things wider or thinner, which should also result in making things less expensive.
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