How Doug Evans Rose from the Ruins of Juicero
One of the most popular Business for Good podcast episodes is Number 81 from January 2022, in which author and Juicero founder Doug Evans came by to share what he learned from that perennially popular Silicon Valley topic: adversity.
A start-up star is born
Doug was already an accomplished CEO before he started Juicero, having helmed his first start-up for a decade and achieving a successful exit. Juicero, which launched in 2016, offered high-tech juicers along with subscription-based purchases of customized veggie and fruit packages to supply them.
While building Juicero, Doug gained admittance to the exclusive world of Silicon Valley financiers. Google Ventures and other high-profile firms ended up funding his start-up for $120 million.
Juicero became a darling of The New York Times. Oprah and Gwyneth Paltrow became advocates. Sports teams started using Juicero, and Whole Foods was selling it.
At the height of its success, customers were using Juicero an average of 9.2 times a week, and the company was growing 20 percent month over month with very low churn. But after 18 months, it was all over.
Aspiring entrepreneurs will find a lot of hard-won wisdom in Doug’s account of his company’s rocket-fast rise and inglorious fall. Not everyone can pick themselves back up after such a long and public corporate demise. We also found out about Doug’s resilience in this conversation, and that’s definitely worth listening to.
Commitment leads to profit
In 2002, Doug was co-founder of Organic Avenue, offering organic products at retail. Now, he’s devoted to Wonder Valley Hot Springs, a resort he founded that offers vacation cabin rentals amid mineral springs in the high desert of the Mohave. He’s so passionate about the numerous health benefits of sprouts that he published The Sprout Book.
While the loss of Juicero was a blow to his ego, Doug was determined to learn from it, as painful as it might be.
Doug’s commitment to healthy eating came from losing almost all of his family to chronic diseases by the time he was 33. He’d grown up eating the typical American diet of processed and refined foods and meat and dairy products. But he changed his approach to eating entirely by adopting a raw, vegan diet.
Working with a friend and fellow vegan, Doug launched Organic Avenue, a business selling cold-pressed organic juices, salads, and full entrées.
From a loft in New York City’s Chinatown, Organic Avenue moved to a small retail store on the Lower East Side. When the company developed a regular cadre of repeat customers and was bringing in $100,000 a month, Doug and his partner knew they needed to expand. From his previous status as an investor, graphic designer, and financial decision-maker, Doug took on the CEO role. Eventually, the company opened a dozen stores across the city and achieved $1 million per month in revenue.
After a decade of slowly growing the business, Organic Avenue raised $1 million in capital. When Doug and his co-founder sold the company, they received a significant payoff, with some investors reaping six times their investment. For a brick-and-mortar start-up, that’s a respectably successful exit.
Realizing a vision
Doug then set out to put the knowledge he’d gained about fresh juices to work in a new company. Looking at the juicers available, he saw a lot of hard-to-clean parts and machinery that was too much trouble to use regularly. The juice wasn’t cold-pressed, and it required customers to take the time to source, clean, and store their own fruits and vegetables. He wanted to streamline the process and make the espresso machine of juicers.
The idea behind Juicero was to supply pre-triple-washed, pre-diced, pre-sliced produce to the consumer in individual cheesecloth packages, to be used in a precision juicer. In designing the juicer, Doug was looking to make the most time-efficient and cost-efficient way to make cold-pressed juices at home. But the most economical model he could devise ended up retailing for $700.
Doug’s prototype “Rube Goldberg” machine, along with an industrial product designer’s 3-D rendering of what the final product would look like, so entranced all those big Silicon Valley investors that the start-up raised $4 million in seed capital right out of the gate. It didn’t hurt that investors got to taste the richness of the fresh juice made right there in front of them.
It also helped, in Doug’s opinion, that he never put up any pretense about who he is or what his philosophy is. He never stopped being the laid-back guy in sandals who believed passionately in his product. He thinks that the biggest reason he got so much venture funding so soon was that he was merely the conduit for a vision bigger than himself.
What went wrong
What escaped Doug and his team at the beginning was the fact that creating the right hardware was, well, hard. Then they had to deal with the challenges of developing the right software, supplying sustainable packaging, and running a production facility that had to constantly be up to FDA requirements. They also moved from a much smaller plant to a 111,000-square-foot facility way before they had to.
In Doug’s view, a big part of the problem was that while Juicero had its band of hard-core enthusiasts who appreciated the long-term value of the product, the rest of the world just didn’t get it. He adds that while we should be eating multiple servings of fresh fruits and vegetables daily, many Americans aren’t eating even one.
As Juicero took off, Doug’s board pressed him to bring on an outsider — someone who had scaled big beverage companies — as CEO. The change from being founder-led and hiring an outside CEO, Doug observes, can be good for some companies but bad for others — like his. And it’s irreversible.
If the issue with his company had been food safety (which it wasn’t), Doug told us that would have been one thing. But a huge part of it was press. Juicero’s rapid rise inevitably resulted in some influential people taking “grave offense at our success.”
A Bloomberg journalist wrote an article lambasting the Juicero Press, saying it was overhyped, yet the piece overlooked how many customers loved it.
Lessons learned
Start-ups, Doug says, shouldn’t be so quick to issue press releases detailing their funding, precisely because this can put “a target on your back.”
The bad press about the price point — by then reduced to $400 — started dragging the company down. “The Bloomberg article became a meme,” Doug told us, which turned Juicero into “a meme of Silicon Valley excess.” He feels like the company failed to leverage the power of direct communication through social media to counter the media narrative.
Because Doug was no longer CEO, he didn’t have the authority to get into a dialogue with skeptics about his vision for healthy living through an innovative product — a vision that previously convinced many a venture funder. By the time Juicero was floundering, Doug had bowed out of any executive role with the company, although he hadn’t sold his shares. So, he went down with the sinking ship.
But Doug hasn’t gone away. He’s still out there preaching the healthy food gospel, primarily through his newfound advocacy for sprouting, hoping to influence the conversation about how food and innovation can keep us healthier longer.
So go check out this back episode. It’s a great lesson in overcoming adversity and moving foward to make a difference in the world.
