Exactly what range of processing is done to the fruits and vegetables before packaging? How effectively washed are they given what we now know about pesticides and cognitive development? How environmentally destructive is individual shipment of the packages? How disposal-friendly are the packages? Are fruits and vegetables sourced in season, locally or organically?<p>I think we can guess what the probable answers are.<p>Process...<p>Step 1: Pick a natural, functional, thing like a fruit.<p>Step 2: Hype the crap out of it (or wait until someone else does).<p>Step 3: Re-invent some part of it (eg. fruit skin) as an artificial product (eg. QR-coded spacepack) so that you can charge money for it, even though this is both unethical and wasteful, and actually less functional in many ways (eg. hard expiry, juice only output, damage less apparent, etc.) than the original.<p>Step 4: Sell a subscription.<p>Step 5: Obtain some kind of industrial protection racket through regulatory means, by claiming the natural alternative is unsanitary, of dubious or dangerously uncontrolled quality.<p>This is basically how a lot of the pharmaceutical industry works (with a few extra steps like co-opting/corrupting established points of community trust, integrating an insurance protection racket, etc.), as well as diet pills, cuisine fads, juice industry, etc.<p>Was this really the top US hardware startup last year?
Also longer article on Ars: <a href="https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/04/this-400-appliance-that-squeezes-juice-out-of-a-bag-appears-unnecessary/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/04/this-400-appliance-...</a>