[00:00:03] John Craven: Hey everyone, I'm John Craven from BevNET, and we're here for another episode of the BevNET Podcast. Today I'm in the Malibu, California area, and I'm joined by Doug Evans of Juicero. Thanks for joining me, Doug. Oh, my pleasure, John. So I finally, and I'm holding it in my hands here, I'm drinking a glass of Juicero juice from this magical little device. Not a little device, I think you guys said it was 31 pounds, right?
[00:00:26] Doug Evans: Right, nine inches by 14 inches.
[00:00:29] John Craven: And I guess I'll, you know, you can't see it, can't smell it or taste it, but it's pretty darn good, nicely done.
[00:00:35] Doug Evans: Thank you, thank you.
[00:00:36] John Craven: So the whole premise behind Juicero seems to be about disruption, right? And creating something that isn't out there in the juicing space. How would you introduce Juicero to our audience?
[00:00:49] Doug Evans: Well, I think that, you know, I've been juicing for 25 years and I've had dozens of juicers, both consumer devices, commercial and industrial. And what I realized is the industrial presses were based on an ancient technology of a rack and cloth. So if any of your listeners want to Google rack and cloth cider press, they'll see how the ancients through today make really high quality juice where they take produce, they slice it, they dice it, they crush it, and then they mash it up and they put it in a cheesecloth or some sort of cloth and then they apply massive amounts of force, literally tons of force. And that's how high quality juice is made And I think all of the major industrial and commercial juice companies that all of your listeners know use big industrial presses.
[00:01:46] John Craven: It seems like the only difference today is instead of being made out of wood or something, they're shiny stainless steel, right?
[00:01:52] Doug Evans: Yeah, stainless steel and plastic. Right. Right. And then instead of cheesecloth, they're using a synthetic cloth. But that's the way that high-quality juice was made. And after I sold my interest in Organic Avenue, I was looking what kind of juicer was I going to get. So in the consumer devices, they're all based on centrifugal or masticating or slow, cold technology. But there were really no simple juice presses that had two plates or platens that press together. So there's a manual one for like 399 or 499, the Wells press, which is like a hydraulic pump, a hydraulic piston inside of a manual welded together machine. There's no grinder. You know, you look at it and it looks like it came out of your garage, but it functions. I had one of those. And then, you know, they go up in thousands of dollars was the nearest entry level. And I believe you have a Norwalk,
[00:02:53] John Craven: I do, and it's, you know, I'm not going to lie, after seeing this thing in action, going home and trying to use that again, which I think my best yield yet on my Norwalk is about two gallons of juice and about, geez, I want to say just over an hour. And then that's for getting about to clean up and, you know, getting yelled at by my wife and for destroying our kitchen and so on. So, yeah.
[00:03:16] Doug Evans: So I had equally bought Norwalks and found that it was such a burden to buy the produce, wash the produce, and juice. So when I looked at what I want to have for my own use, I thought about the industrial way of making juice, where you get produce in, you triple wash it, you then slice it, dice it, chop it, and mix it to get the right formula. Then you put it in the cheesecloth and then you press it. So the idea for Juicero is how I could take that mainframe type juicing experience and make it personal.
[00:03:52] John Craven: Yeah. And I mean, it seems like you've taken that to like a whole other level in terms of just, you know, the wifi connectivity and you were describing, and I'll try to say it, um, or my interpretation of it, but you know, you have full control over what the consumer can do, right? Uh, down to, I think one thing that was pretty neat talking about your ability as CEO of Juicero to literally, you know, institute a recall, which stops people from pressing bags that they shouldn't. You know, that's an entirely different level of control and safety than you'll get with any other product out there.
[00:04:24] Doug Evans: Well, you know, being in the food business, safety is the number one top priority. Like we have two PhDs in our food safety group and one former microbiologist who worked at the FDA. So we were really concerned with kind of safety and quality. So when we think less about control, but more about how do you have quality and quality, people tend to abuse expiration dates, best by dates, sell by dates. It's not very clear. And when you're dealing with fresh produce, I wanted to make sure that both the sensory experience and the flavor profiles were within the freshness dates. So we said, oh, well, how can we do that? And a lot of these flavors are new to people. So people know what rotten milk smells like. But no one would know what a green beet ginger combination would smell like if it wasn't fresh anymore. So we decided to do years of testing on shelf life and sensory as to how long things would really be good for, and we're constantly testing. And so we decided to look at the long-term perspective of what does a consumer want? Like, what do I want when I'm consuming something? I want to know where is that produce coming from. I want to know what ingredients are inside. I want to know when it was packed. and I want to know what the nutrition is. And I also optically want to know when it expires. But then sometimes I move around really quickly and it would be possible for me to put something into the Juicero that might not be kosher or within its best use state. So we decided to go through that extra effort of putting in the technology for improving quality.
[00:06:10] John Craven: Well, again, the results of it so far seem pretty impressive as I continue to sip on this juice here. You know, I think as far as the disruption, I guess just to jump ahead a little bit, you know, that seems to be something that keeps coming up in all of the press that's out there. Who is it that, you know, you see Juicero really disrupting both, you know, short term and long term?
[00:06:33] Doug Evans: Well, you know, to me, I love all juice, right? So I've been drinking juice as my line is there's juice in my veins. So I think one of the things is that, you know, coffee, I think will radically be disrupted. And coffee, people are very dependent on coffee and they drink coffee multiple times a day. And when I looked at the macro level, People who have a juicer, any kind of juicer, Breville, Jacqueline, Juiceman, Cuisinart, they use that juicer maybe once or twice a month. But if they have a Nespresso or a Keurig, they use it once or twice a day. And so what if we looked at the number of occasions that people were consuming a beverage, and if we could take more slots of those occasions and make them with fresh, ripe, raw, organic fruits and vegetables?
[00:07:23] John Craven: And that, I guess, the idea being that if juice is easier to make, they're drinking it more. The disruption is basically, you know, whatever, I don't know, stomach share is being taken away. Share of bladder. Right, share of bladder. There you go. Another way to say it. There's also been, you know, certainly a lot of talk about the obvious big number when it comes to the funding that you've raised, which I think is $120 million. You know, the press ranges from, I don't know, I guess confused to somewhat aggressively calling, you know, BS on this thing. You know, it's an expensive juicer for rich people or whatever it is you said.
[00:07:58] Doug Evans: Yeah.
[00:07:58] John Craven: Now, obviously there's a lot more that's been, you know, done than just building a fancy appliance. You know, it seems like there's a lot of technology in, you know, the bags and the supply chain to get it there. Um, you know, can you give us some insight just into, you know, how this is being deployed?
[00:08:14] Doug Evans: Yeah, I think, you know, the people like yourself who have tasted the juice and who understand it, look at this as an incredible bargain. Because instead of spending thousands of dollars, they can spend hundreds of dollars. And a normal juicer, people have to spend their time juicing. The Juicera experience, when I made you your three juices, took me, in aggregate, I think about 15 seconds of my time and about 15 minutes of the Juicero time, including the ability for us to do, while you and I are doing things, the press is actually doing the work. So there's an enormous level of advanced technology. If this were a product coming from a big company, no one would think about funding or the like. Like when I was reading through the filings for Keurig, when they launched Keurig Cold, they invested hundreds of millions of dollars in order to create a new appliance, a new supply chain, new packaging materials, all the testing that was required. When a big company like Dole decides that they want to do bagged salad, right, all of a sudden they have to build a $100 million plant and they have to hire food scientists and microbiologists and do the packaging. So if this were coming from an existing company, the funding would be irrelevant.
[00:09:32] John Craven: Well, I guess to that point, you know, talking about something like Keurig developing a machine for a couple hundred million, that's jump change, right? Yeah. So why do you think it's attracted so much attention then?
[00:09:42] Doug Evans: I think that it's never been done before. The normal way, like even in Silicon Valley, the way startups were funded is someone might do a Kickstarter or an Indiegogo campaign and they create their minimum viable product and they do pre-orders and then they sell and they They kind of add on to it and they grow more organically. When we looked at the Juicero opportunity and said, in order to make it easy for people to have more servings of fresh, ripe, raw, organic fruits and vegetables, we need to literally create this entire platform, literally from farm to glass. So we have to go directly to the farmers because I know the difference between buying produce at a grocery store versus ordering produce from a distributor or having a direct relationship with a farmer. Like, in that continuum, at Organic Avenue, we were the largest independent buyer of organic produce in New York, if not on the East Coast. So, I knew what it was like to get super fresh produce. So, in that case, the 14 organic farmers that we're dealing with at Ducera, we have direct relationships with. We inspect their water. We look at their good farming practices. You know, the quality levels and the checklists are extremely high. And we don't store that produce for the highly perishable tender greens. We don't store that at Gucero. So by having a direct-to-consumer e-commerce model, we aggregate the orders, we break them into the little shopping lists, and we go to the various farmers for the various ingredients. They harvest on demand. It comes into our plant, we triple wash them, chop them, mix them, pack them, and then they go out and we do that every day. So that idea of freshness and quality, we had to create that from scratch because that's not how the fresh produce agriculture worked. When we looked at thinking like a normal food company or a beverage company gets to use copackers, right? So we looked at almost every possible option of who could make these basically bags of fresh produce at our standard and level. No one had the equipment and no one had the safety level and the standards for what we wanted to do. So we actually had to secure a four and a half acre lot with 111,000 square foot green building with solar panels on the roof and 90,000 square feet of walk-in refrigeration and floor drains and HEPA air filtration and chilled water systems and the entire plant operates at 35 degrees. So, and today we're only using a fraction of that plant. It's 110,000 square feet. We're occupying about 8,000. but having, knowing like where the trajectory is. There's so many of these closest analog is the meal delivery companies. And I remember someone sent me a link to a Shark Tank episode of one of the companies and they had to move their kitchen operation seven times. And having know what it's like to move or to set up in the disruption, we said, we need to have long-term planning.
[00:13:00] John Craven: So I guess that begs kind of an obvious question of, you know, how much capacity have you built for? Is it related to how many machines are sold? Like how, I guess, big can this get with what you have? And without, you know, obviously I'm not trying to pry into, you know, the financial aspect of the company too much, but do you have a sense of, or what are your own kind of like sense of like how big this gets and how fast?
[00:13:26] Doug Evans: Our current plant is capable of producing millions of packs per week. And we have now the format of what equipment and what the, like we have certain wash lines that can do 7,000 pounds per hour and certain ones that only do 3,000 pounds. And so the various lines have various throughput. So once we understand in the future how much capacity we need. So if we want to enter another market, say Austin, Texas, we could look at the market, we can determine precisely how many square feet we need for the plant, how many floor drains, what kind of air pressure, how many pieces of X equipment to secure that amount of volume. So in the current plant, we have a lot of room to grow as well as to design and to test different formats, different pieces of equipment.
[00:14:18] John Craven: But I guess the approach you're taking with direct like farm relationships, that's something that, you know, there aren't too many areas in the country where you can do that year round. So the plant that you've built, do you look at this as sort of a, I don't know, a central facility or is it a hub and spoke type thing at some point? You know, how does something that's so tied to agriculture scale so that me who lives in, you know, good old New England where we don't have that many months of, you know, great produce, like how do you eventually reach me?
[00:14:47] Doug Evans: I think there's a lot of things that grow in New England. A lot of people don't realize a lot of the greens are winter crops, et cetera. So I think we'll have a very local regional agricultural strategy for the plant and we'll have to truck in whatever is necessary in order to complete them. But I can imagine being very regionally based recipes. So certain things just may not be available in certain markets all times of the year. And we're taking when the individual packs range in price from $4 to $7, with certain specialty items being as high as $10. The variance is based on access to produce. So it's a very farm stand pricing methodology, some things low cost we'll pass that savings along and if something's higher it'll be reflected in the prices and the you as the consumer can decide whether you want to pay for this particular item at this time of year.
[00:15:46] John Craven: So I guess hypothetically me in New England like it should be cheaper to use my Juicero in say July than it is in January and the flavors might evolve is essentially what you're saying.
[00:15:57] Doug Evans: Potentially. It might be there's an abundance of dark green leafy vegetables in the winter crops. So figuring that part out is a big data science project that our data scientists are deep into working that out. But we start off with one large plant in California that can actually handle the whole West Coast. And we're deliberating very carefully to what secondary and tertiary markets we'll expand into and how quickly.
[00:16:27] John Craven: Makes sense. And I mean, it's just really neat that there's so many facets to this. Not only is it, you know, hardware, software in there somewhere, but it's also this agricultural supply chain that's certainly super complicated and probably less understood and appreciated at the consumer level, right? I mean, everyone can sort of see the shiny device and, you know, wow, that costs a lot of money to make. But, you know, your average consumer doesn't really have a sense of how much it costs to source quality kale and all that other stuff that you're doing to create the, you know, input to the machine.
[00:16:59] Doug Evans: Yeah. I mean, I think when we look at this is that people, Americans, are not getting enough servings of fruits and vegetables and certainly not getting enough dark green leafy vegetables and root vegetables and organic. So when I look at that gap where the average American is consuming less than one serving of fruits and vegetables and that serving might be potatoes and then tomatoes and onions and iceberg lettuce versus the ingredients that we're using in Juicero, that what we found is if you make it really delicious and it's under $10, people are spending that on a cocktail, on a latte, today on potentially a juice in a bottle. So there's already a big category, and you probably know the metrics better than I, super premium products, priced single serving between three and $10, it's a pretty big category.
[00:17:57] John Craven: Right, definitely. So one last thing I want to touch on, which I thought was pretty interesting, there was the comment, I don't know which interview it came up in, comparing this to the model that Tesla is using for its cars, which you called this the Roadster, which for those of you out there who haven't heard what Elon Musk said, it was sort of starting out with a Roadster, which was low volume, high price, and it basically funded, you know, the next vehicle, slightly less high price, slightly higher volume, kind of repeating to the point of like affordable and, you know, widely available. So if this is the Tesla Roadster of Juicero, you know, what is sort of the next step? Are we, you know, eventually on a path where this thing is in Target next to a Keurig machine at a cheap price, or give us somewhat of a sense of what's in the crystal ball here.
[00:18:45] Doug Evans: Yeah, I think taking a long-term perspective, you know, we have a pretty broad international roadmap with a lot of different products and services. So the things that I could say within the two weeks since we launched, what customers and the public is asking for is they're saying they want to be able to have compostable packaging. And so we're two years and over a million dollars into developing fully garden compostable packaging. Huge victory, and I think that could be used in other industries as well, now that we want to go into the material science business. but we went in to do that. I think people want to be able to fill their own packs. So we're open to doing that, but you having a Norwalk can understand that you just can't take produce and put it in a bag. So we have to look at how we can enable people to fill their own packs and again, gain the benefit of not having to clean the press.
[00:19:46] John Craven: Or does that leave room open for third parties to produce packs who might meet standards or whatever you set out?
[00:19:54] Doug Evans: There's a list of people that have applied already to be able to do that. I think food service for us, we thought that would be later down the line, and people are banging on the door to do that. even before we announced it, Le Pan Quotidien LPQ in Los Angeles reached out and said, hey, we want to put, we have 20 restaurants here. We want to put in, you know, we never been able to figure out how we could do this level of, of quality green vegetable juice, you know, in our restaurants and our customers want that.
[00:20:29] John Craven: Awesome. Well, it sounds like it's been a pretty exciting two weeks since the launch. I know the official sort of rollout and when you're taking orders, I think is in the summer. Is that correct?
[00:20:37] Doug Evans: We're going to start shipping in California around March, May 15th.
[00:20:41] John Craven: Okay, so sooner than I thought even. Yeah. Awesome. Well, hey, Doug, thanks a lot for the time. It's been great. Appreciate you joining me and giving some insight here for our listeners. And that's another episode of our BevNET podcast. So please stay tuned for more. And at any point, if you have feedback, feel free to email us at news at BevNET.com. So thanks again for listening.
