Juicero is offering refunds to customers who bought its $400 app-enabled tabletop cold press juicer, a day after reports circulated that the juice bags could be squeezed just as well by hand.
The juice-tech startup’s CEO Jeff Dunn made the announcement on blogging site Medium. For the next 30 days, “if you send us your Press, we’ll refund the money you paid for it. Period,” Dunn wrote.
“We strive to put our customer at the center of everything, and to do so with utmost transparency and integrity. That’s our business credo, as well my own personal belief system,” he continued.
Dunn defended the juicer, into which $120 million of venture capital has already been injected. “The value of Juicero is more than a glass of cold-pressed juice. Much more,” he said.
The juicing CEO referenced the high-tech capabilities of the product, which include a “closed loop food safety system that allows us to remotely disable Produce Packs if there is, for example, a spinach recall.”
After a Bloomberg investigation demonstrated how the juice packs could be hand-squeezed without the need for the juicer, Dunn said: “We know hacking consumer products is nothing new,” and described the process as “a mediocre (and maybe very messy) experience that you won’t want to repeat once, let alone every day.”
Included in Dunn’s post is a video in which one of Juicero’s bags is cut open and its contents—”fresh, raw, organic chopped produce, not juice”—is displayed for the camera.
According to one of the Bloomberg reporters, however, liquid can be extracted from the package; they “simply applied light pressure to the bag and the juice poured out.”