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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

juice

Better Juice Uses Microorganisms to Reduce Sugar in OJ (and Beyond)

On the weekends if I go out to brunch, I like to treat myself to a tall glass of orange juice along with my pancakes and eggs. Which seems like a healthy choice: OJ, after all, is fruit — it’s got to be good for me, right?

Apparently, not so much. According to a study in the journal Nutrition (via NPR), fruit juice has a fructose concentration of about 45.5 grams per liter — which is only a smidgen less than soda, which averages at 50 grams per liter. Just one cup of OJ has 21 grams of sugar, which is almost half of the FDA’s recommended daily sugar limit.

But you don’t necessarily have to ditch your OJ just yet. A company called Better Juice is developing a way to cut down on the amount of simple sugars in fruit juice, honey, agave, and more. Founded in 2017, the Israeli startup has created a column-shaped piece of hardware which contains mobilized non-GMO microorganisms.

The column is adjustable and electric powered. After the juice is squeezed workers pour it into the column, which uses pumps, heat exchangers, and cooling to pass the liquid through the micro-organisms and out the other side. As it goes through, the microorganisms convert the fructose, glucose, and sucrose (basically, all the molecules that make food taste sweet) in the juice into fibers that will, um, pass, instead of absorbing into your body.

“We’re not actually removing the sugar,” explained Better Juice CEO Eran Blachinsky over the phone. “We’re leaving it in the juice, just in a non-digestible form.” Blachinsky wouldn’t disclose what kind of microorganisms they used (algae, yeast, etc.) but told me that they were food grade. The entire process takes about one hour from start to finish.

Jenn Marston wrote about Better Juice earlier this year, stating that its low-sugar, high-fiber product “basically solves the two biggest gripes about fruit juice out there right now.”

Of course, reducing the digestible sugar content also means the juice will taste less sweet, so the company has to strike a balance between health and flavor. “We are able to reduce 87 percent of the sugars,” said Blachinsky. “But most people enjoy a 30 percent reduction.” According to him, that percentage maintains the sweet taste while still allowing the beverage company to label their product as “reduced sugar,” targeting health-conscious consumers.

Better Juice currently has six employees and has received approximately $500,000 from Israeli food tech incubator The Kitchen Hub. The company has just completed its prototype and will be piloting it abroad with three beverage companies: one in Israel and two “abroad.”

Each liter of Better Juice’s micro-organism-filled column can treat 1,000 liters of juice. Blachinksy didn’t disclose exact pricing details, noting that the number depends on the quantity in production, but said that 1 cubic meter of column would cost between $100,000 and $200,000 total. While the hardware will last indefinitely, the company has to replace the micro-organisms ever 2 to 3 months.

Reduced sugar beverages are growing in popularity — soda sales are down, while low-sugar or sugar-free ready-to-drink (RTD) products are on the rise. With its B2B technology that allows any juice (or honey, or ice cream, etc.) company to reduce the amount of sugar in their product, without sacrificing taste, Better Juice could help a large range of companies break into the burgeoning healthy drink market.

The only issue I could see is adoption difficulties on the manufacturing side. Blachinksy asserted that Better Juice’s column is easy to install and wouldn’t require specially trained or skilled employees, but it’s easy to be optimistic before the real-world test of a pilot program. If the column is indeed as easy to plug into manufacturing practices as Blachinsky hopes, it could be a pretty sweet (sorry) deal for all involved.

Why Did The Internet Hate On Juicero?

The Internet can be a cruel place.

That’s especially true when you or your company becomes the subject of a widely shared article where everyone piles on and has some fun at your expense. That’s exactly what happened last week to Juicero, maker of a connected juicer, when Bloomberg posted an article entitled Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze. In the article, the authors “scooped” that users could squeeze Juicero’s juice packs with their hands and get a glass of juice without using the company’s $400 cold press juicing machine.

The article soon went viral, resulting in thousands of tweets and retweets and dozens of follow on thought pieces that pointed to Juicero as an example of Silicon Valley excess. ‘Look’, they all seemed to say, ‘a company raised $120 million to create a $400 juicer for the home and you don’t even need it.’

So, was the article fair? And why exactly did the Internet decide that Juicero was so deserving of mockery?

To figure that out, let’s take first take a look at the article that caused all the commotion.

The Bloomberg Article

The article’s main focus centers around the fact you can squeeze the juice packs with your hands to pour a glass of juice. Bloomberg even created a video titled “Do You Need a $400 Juicer?” in which they showed a side by side comparison of a person hand-squeezing the Juicero packs and the Juicero machine squeezing a pack to create a glass of juice. The video is narrated by a text overlay that declares at the end of two minutes, “no expensive juice machine needed.”

The authors go on to tell us about how two investors in Juicero were surprised to learn that you could squeeze the Juicero packs and get roughly the same amount of juice. They tell us about how “one of the investors said they were frustrated with how the company didn’t deliver on the original pitch and that their venture firm wouldn’t have met with Evans if he were hawking bags of juice that didn’t require high-priced hardware.”

In short, the article has all the necessary ingredients to create a collective Internet gasp, in which everyone agrees about the silliness of investing in company that created an expensive juicer that you don’t really need.

But was Juicero deserving of all this mockery? And, in the end, was it silly to invest $120 million in a company that created a cold press juicer for the home that users could make superfluous with their own hands?

Here are my thoughts:

Juicero brought much of this on themselves.

At this point, every company should know that by proclaiming that your company is creating a “platform” and is trying to, in its own way, change the world, you are setting yourself up for some take-no-prisoners commentary when you stumble.

Take this tweet from CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal:

In today’s world where shows like HBO’s Silicon Valley regularly skewer the tech industry’s self-importance, any talk about changing the world with high-priced products that are largely targeted at higher-income consumers is ripe for poking some fun at.

You Can Hand Squeeze The Juice Packs. So What?

Yes, you can hand-squeeze the juice packs. But here’s the thing: if you’re paying $5 to $8 for a glass of juice, chances are you’re the kind of person who will pay for the convenience of a $400 juicer to do that for you every morning.

Before you disagree with me, I’d suggest to first do the math: If you are a home juicer who wants to spend $50 a week on Juicero juice packs, note this will come to about $2500 a year. If you have enough money to spend $2500 on your juice habit, you have enough money to spend $400 on a device to save you a little time and hand fatigue every morning.

This doesn’t even consider professional markets, where Juicero is finding some early success, where multitasking restaurant or cafe workers don’t have 2 minutes to squeeze juice from raw vegetables and fruit into a glass.

The Investment Was Significant, But It Was For More Than Just a Home Juicer

What the Bloomberg article fails to mention is the $120 million invested in Juicero went to more than just the creation of an expensive home juicer, but also to the creation of a full delivery system, which includes the company’s own factory to make the juice packs.

Back when Doug Evans was looking to create what became the Juicero, he tried to find a food packing facility that could create his juice packs, which would involve taking raw fruits and vegetables, putting into small delivery pods, and getting them out to the end user in a matter of a day or two since the packs had a shelf life of about a week.

In the end, he couldn’t find anyone that could meet those timelines needed for this new system so he decided to create his own factory.

My guess is much of the capital went towards the creation of this full end-to-end pack based delivery system.  Sure, that doesn’t hide the fact that $120 million is a significant amount of capital to entrust to a CEO who’s previous juice company eventually went out of business (ed note: after Evans had sold it off to another company), but I think the vision is a bigger one than was portrayed in the Bloomberg story.

It’s Might Be a Platform. But It Is Definitely A New Delivery System…For Juice

Above I discussed that where Juicero got into trouble is when they called their cold press juicer and pack-based delivery system a ‘platform’. The word platform is an overused one today in Silicon Valley, in part because VCs so love a word that connotes a bigger idea and ultimate return on investment, especially when the alternative in the hardware world is something that might be termed a “gadget”.

Who wants to invest $120 million in a gadget?

What the company probably should do more is talk about their end-to-end delivery system for fresh juice, which is in a sense something no company had created before. Sure, you can buy “cold-pressed” bottles of juice at the grocery store, but those bottles were cold-pressed in a factory, not in your home. You can also press juice from raw ingredients the old fashioned way, but the result is a mess and 30-60 minutes of your morning down the drain after you’ve cut, sliced, juiced and cleaned up.

Bottom Line: My view is the Juicero juicer and delivery system is focused on creating more convenience for the home juicer in a market in which hardware alone is a $3 billion business. That’s before one factors in how much people spend on the raw ingredients for juice, which I am sure far exceeds the amount spent on hardware.

In creating its juicer and delivery system, they spent a lot of money, and may have over-engineered the juicer and added extra cost to the machine. But, they’ve also likely created defendable intellectual property and a delivery model that could see significant traction in both professional and home markets over time if they can defend that IP.

Will it pay off? Too soon to tell. But regardless of the ultimate end result for the company, I don’t think the fact you can hand-squeeze their juice packs will be the determining factor in the success or non-succes of the company.

Connectivity Should Add Value, and Other Lessons We Can Learn From Juicero’s Business Model (VIDEO)

When Doug Evans decided to start a new company a few years ago, he asked himself one question. “What could I do that would have the biggest effect on human health?” he wondered. “The answer was juice.”

That might sound like hyperbole when talking about Juicero, the first connected-kitchen countertop cold-press juicer. We are talking about liquid kale, after all. But because of the company’s goals, functionality, and business model, which Evans discussed at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle (watch the video below), it’s so much more. Here are three ways Juicero exemplifies a progressive mindset.

Make Something Useful

Unlike the big, bulky juicer that I have in my closet and never use, the Juicero is designed for people to use one to two times per day. It requires one touch to work and doesn’t need to be cleaned. Juicero provides ready-to-go packs of vegetables and fruit, delivered straight to your door.

“Is [a product] adding value to me as a consumer, or is it a liability because it means you have to maintain those services and consumers have to rely on those services?”

The company has set up an ecosystem that others can now use to maximize consumer health. “We have a cold supply chain, farm direct produce, IoT channel, appliances — You can use your imagination to think what else you can put through there that would make it easier for people to have other items that are made with fresh, ripe, raw, organic produce,” Evans said.

Connectivity Should Add Value

“Is [a product] adding value to me as a consumer, or is it a liability because it means you have to maintain those services and consumers have to rely on those services?” Richard Gunther of Universal Mind asked. These are essential questions in this wild west of connected-kitchen gadgets. In Juicero’s case, its app does everything from ordering automatically for enterprise accounts to telling home users that a pack in their refrigerator is about to expire. A scanner inside the juicer syncs with your app to tell you what you’re drinking, and if the pack is expired, the Juicero will not juice it. Talk about fresh.

Think Outside the Home

Evans is wisely following Keurig’s business model, focusing on restaurants, businesses, and other food service opportunities before moving to the end user market. The system only needs 10 square feet of space to work and doesn’t require someone to wash, peel, and juice produce as well as get rid of waste, making it an easy addition for restaurants and more.

Right now Juicero is only available in California and is available for purchase online. Watch the video to find out more!