Thread: MonaVie – The Worst Juice in America?

From a MonaVie slam site, this interesting comparison...


MonaVie – The Worst Juice in America?

The good people from Men’s Health and the related book, Eat This, Not That, have come up with a list of 20 Worst Drinks in America. The drink are in various categories. The Worst Juice Imposter came in at #12 in the form of Arizona Kiwi Strawberry. One can is 23 fl. oz. and has 345 calories, 0 grams of fat, and 81 grams of sugar – the sugar equivalent of 7 bowls of Froot Loops. The authors claimed:

“The twisted minds at the Arizona factory outdid themselves with this nefarious concoction, a can the size of a bazooka loaded with enough of the sweet stuff to blast your belly with 42 sugar cubes. The most disturbing part isn’t that it masks itself as some sort of healthy juice product (after all, hundreds of products are guilty of the same crime), but that this behemoth serving size costs just $.99, making its contents some of the cheapest calories we’ve ever stumbled across.”

That made me think… what would the nutritional value of 23 ounces of MonaVie look like in terms of calories and sugar? After all, 23 ounces of drink is 23 ounces of drink… and almost every drink in the article is ranked in these terms.

If you were to drink 23 ounces of MonaVie, you’d have 690 calories. That’s exactly twice the amount of the Worst Juice Imposter. 23 ounces of MonaVie is also 69 grams of sugar… the equivalent of 6 bowls of Froot Loops. Arizona Kiwi Strawberry is great in that it won’t hurt your wallet too much with a 99 cent price tag for 23 ounces. MonaVie’s 23 ounce price tag will run you more than $30 in most cases, which can put quite a dent in your wallet.

borrowed from: JuiceScam.com

The parents of one of my childhood friends just added me on FB and is constantly posting youtube videos about how awesome MonaVie is. Lol... maybe I should post this link? See what he says.

God... that's so much sugar too. Enough to make me sick even thinking about it.

Originally Posted by LisaN

The parents of one of my childhood friends just added me on FB and is constantly posting youtube videos about how awesome MonaVie is. Lol... maybe I should post this link? See what he says.

God... that's so much sugar too. Enough to make me sick even thinking about it.

And that's the whole point, Lisa.

With that amount of sugar, Monavie WILL "make you sick"

More so if it's a child consuming the stuff.

If the quoted figures are correct, Monavie has only a miniscule amount less sugar than Coca Cola.

The main difference being, nowhere does Coca Cola claim to be a healthy alternative to anything.

Add the sugar content to dubious and unproven health claims, unsubstantiated efficacy of many of the ingredients, lack of FDA approval AND the oft criticized MLM model and Monavie becomes an ideal subject of anti scam forums.

The following are extracts from an article in the Salt Lake Tribune

Just a drop for most distributors at Utah juice companies

By Tom Harvey

The Salt Lake Tribune
First published Dec 10 2011 06:13PM
Updated Dec 11, 2011 01:18PM


The once-surging Utah-based seller of a blend of fruit juices, MonaVie LLC, is rebranding itself to the world as "MonaVie Community Commerce: The No. 1 Business Opportunity."

The new slogan is the South Jordan company’s effort to stir up some of the passions and sales that sprung up after its debut almost eight years ago, when it built a cult-like following and generated billions of dollars with a concoction of juices formulated around the supposed healthy attributes of the açai fruit from the Amazon jungle.


The company hopes the phrase better represents what multilevel marketing — also called direct sales or network sales — in which company revenue comes from selling products to independent distributors. Distributors, in turn, are told they can earn anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to fabulous riches through retail sales and commissions from building "downlines" of distributors beneath them.

But behind the new slogan, which suggests a kind of intimate, we’re-all-in-this-together, friends-and-family business model, still lies a stark statistical reality. An analysis of the average earnings data provided by MonaVie in 2009, when it last supplied distributors with comprehensive numbers, reveals that 98.5 percent of distributors who earned commissions averaged just $129 a month despite the pitches to the contrary.


The history of the rise of MonaVie also reveals a spotted record of exaggerated claims of relief from serious illnesses and questionable claims of nutritional values, as well as odds clearly stacked against low-level distributors who poured in the billions of dollars that fueled the company’s spectacular growth.
MonaVie’s story also raises questions about the foundations on which other companies in that thriving segment of Utah’s multibillion-dollar nutritional supplement industry were built.


MonaVie representatives declined to answer specific questions or verify facts for this story, saying the company was disappointed that TheSalt Lake Tribune "continues its assault on the direct sales industry in Utah."


The suit also uncovered an internal MonaVie memo by Ralph Carson, the company’s chief science officer, who created the original juice. The memo was in response to raised eyebrows about claims being made about the juice. Carson cautioned that the drink was "expensive flavored water. Any claims made are purely hypothetical, unsubstantiated and, quite frankly, bogus," according to a court transcript that quoted an Amway attorney. That attorney also read from a portion of a transcript of a deposition in which another attorney questioned Carson:

"You have indicated, as I understood it, during your deposition today, that you never understood or knew the contents of MonaVie’s drink. Is that correct?"

Answer: "Completely correct."


Beyond the claims of relieving various ailments, there also are basic problems with nutritional claims.
MonaVie Essentials, the company’s original juice blend, is touted on its website as "delivering "the antioxidant capacity of approximately 13 servings of common fruits and vegetables in just four ounces." Antioxidants are good for your health but, according to nutritional experts in academia and nonprofit groups, there’s no adequate research to show that the body can make use of that big a dose.

In 2008, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, also found açai to be a middling source of antioxidants, ranking behind red wine, pomegranates and store-bought grapes, and blueberry and black-cherry juices. A 2007 publication by the Australian Consumers Association found that a common apple beat the antioxidant potency of juices containing açai, mangosteen (used by XanGo), noni (used by Tahitian Noni) and the goji berry.


With numbers reported by the company, Inc. magazine in 2009 named MonaVie the 18th-fastest-growing private U.S. company, with a growth rate of 5,883 percent from 2005 to 2008. Larsen was named the Ernest & Young entrepreneur of the year in 2009 in the emerging-companies category.
The company declined to provide its profit margin, but Vice Chairman Henry Marsh has said it was similar to publicly reporting companies such as Nu Skin. For 2010, Nu Skin reported a gross margin — profit divided by revenue, the higher the margin the more profitable the company — at 82 percent.
—
So who benefits from those high profits? MonaVie and other MLMs fervently preach about the business opportunities they present for a potential distributor.

But, according to MonaVie’s distributor income disclosure statements, the vast majority — at least 86 percent of all those who sign agreements — don’t earn any bonuses. MonaVie says the 86 percent includes those who signed up only to buy the product at wholesale prices, but it won’t provide a breakdown of how many of those simply failed to recruit any other distributors and earned no money as a result.


Counting only distributors who earned commission checks in its 2010 statement, the very top 1 percent of MonaVie distributors took home an average of $52,992 per month, compared with the 99 percent who averaged $841 a month.

Only .05 percent — 34 people out of 92,000 or so active distributors — earned a million dollars or more in 2009.


For earnings that could be considered a car payment, only 5 percent of commission-earning distributors received an average of about $300 monthly. And about 90 percent made even less than that.

To put it another way, those 95 percent all together averaged only $200 a month.

At XanGo in 2009, the latest available income statement, the top 1.2 percent of distributors received an average of $37,019 a month, while the rest — 98.8 percent — averaged $163 in monthly commissions, according to the company’s own analysis.


But the experience of Donna Pierce of Corona, Calif., provides a glimpse. She looked to be a typical MonaVie distributor in 2009.

In her accounting of 11 months of her MonaVie distributorship, she earned an average of $209 a month in commissions, putting her somewhere among those in the lowest categories, where 98 percent of all commission earners reside. But her expenses averaged $520 a month, an average loss of nearly $311 a month.


For the 11 months she accounted for in a filing in bankruptcy court in California, June 2009 to April 2010, she lost $3,418, with deficits every month.


The other factor that argues against making a success as a distributor is the turnover rate. MonaVie and other MLMs in Utah do not disclose such rates, but the Direct Selling Association estimates the average annual rate of people leaving MLMs is 56 percent. That means statistically a company loses all of its distributors in a little less than two years. Because their revenue comes from sales to distributors, the companies must constantly recruit new sources of sales.

Top-level MonaVie distributor Hart freely admitted in an interview earlier this year that the MLM business was about constantly attracting new people.


"I have nothing to lose or gain in telling the truth. I love this industry," Hart said. "But our industry is all about sponsoring them faster than they quit. So you have to put them in faster than they get out."

Read the complete Salt Lake Tribune article online HERE