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April 22, 2016
Inside the Machine: The Juicero Cold-Press
It Takes Four Tons of Force to Liberate Our Juice
Let’s break it all down with a little help from our trusty engineering team.
Let the Force Be With You
Miniaturizing the industrial-sized cold-press machine into a countertop version is no simple feat. Yet that’s the dilemma that our mechanical engineers had to solve. They tackled it by starting with the concept that simple machines—like levers, wheels and gears—offer great mechanical advantages.
If you know a thing or two about physics, you know that a better mechanical advantage means that you can make any kind of work, like pulling, lifting, or in our case pressing, more manageable. Without giving away any trade secrets, we’ll just say that our engineers implemented a custom gear train that exchanges high speed for high torque, slowing speeds of 2500 RPM to 6 RPM while generating massive amounts of pressing force.
All of this becomes hugely important when you’re trying to harness four tons of force to squeeze juice out of not very juicy things like carrots, kale and spinach.
Like Squeezing Water from a Rock
Let’s take this a little further. Carrot juice is trapped inside strong, tough plant matter called cellulose—it’s the very same thing that makes wood strong. (This is the pulp, or fiber byproduct, that you’ll get after pressing.) The cellulose is organized into a strong structure of stacked cells, and within those cells lives cytoplasm, aka the juice. The cytoplasm is essentially rainwater and nutrients from the soil (organic in our case) where the plants grow. Or as our founder Doug likes to say: “Juicero juice is rainwater that’s filtered through organic soil, roots, shoots, stems, and the leaves and the flesh of the plant. We simply squash that produce to get a real vitamin, mineralized water.”
As you can imagine, an enormous amount of force is necessary to extract the cytoplasm, and cold-press machines create that force by using platens. Other juice machines extract juice by shredding or ripping the cellulose which then spins or drips out the juice. After studying some serious platen physics, we built the Juicero Press in a state-of-the art way that’s meant to optimize the rate of spread of the produce inside our Pack. This design enables the Press to apply even pressure over our fresh produce until the cells pop out like popping bubble wrap. At the end of the pressing, virtually all the juice is extracted and poured into your glass, and only dry, fibrous pulp remains.
Taking Inspiration From Airplanes
Aircraft-grade 7075 T6 aluminum is used in the precision door, latch and hinge system. While you might not know exactly what kind of aluminum that is, just know that this material is famous for its favorable strength-to-weight ratio. (If you’re still not convinced, our engineers suggest you try lifting up the equivalent amount of steel.) Anyway, what you should really know is that you can probably lift it without throwing out your back, and you can rest assured that those 4 tons of pressing force are being safely contained.
Force with Finesse
Now that all of the power is safely harnessed, the next step is to unleash it in the most effective way possible. Force without finesse won’t press the best juice. For example, if you take a hammer to a carrot, trust us, you won’t get juice. You’ll get a shattered carrot.
As the Juicero Press presses, we’ve configured it so that it applies more force through our precision-control electronics—to make sure we use the most force when we need it the most, and the least force when we don’t need a lot. All of this results in a vibrantly colored and smoothly textured drink.
We bet you’re thirsty now.