I’m not a big fan in spending $3-5 at Starbucks. I’m not the only one. Well-known personal finance guru David Bach has written a lot about the latte factor. Specifically he points out that people spend a thousand dollars a year or more on this coffee habit. He makes a strong argument that it’s why Americans have under-funded emergency funds, credit problems, under-funded retirement accounts, etc. Bach has realized that a lot of small expenses over time really do add up.

When you pay for coffee at Starbucks, you are also paying for the overhead that Starbucks has in running many stores and employing many baristas. You also pay for the experience of Starbucks which is greater than just coffee – it’s a comfy chair and nice music.

MonaVie does not have the overhead of running a store. It does not provide an experience beyond drinking juice in your home.

The great thing about coffee is that it can be made at home relatively cheaply for just a few cents for a large mug. MonaVie does not provide this relatively cheap option. One can clearly see these are not comparable.

I would also like to point out that MonaVie does not provide a thirst quenching replacement for another beverage. Thus people drinking MonaVie are likely also going to be spending an additional $3-5 at Starbucks anyway. Thus buying MonaVie adds a “Latte Factor” to people’s lives, without providing nutrition or quenching one’s thirst.. That seems like lose-lose-lose to me.

As far as the health goes, other beverages that are more healthy such as Welch’s Grape Juice avoid the latte factor and quench thirst. I see that as a win-win-win for consumers.

Originally posted 2010-04-25 09:51:15.

I found out pretty quickly that there’s a product on the market called Benecol Smart Chews. You can buy 120 of them at that link for $28.99 at the time of this publishing. There might be more options available, but I chose this product because it was the first that I found.

Looking at Benecol Smart Chews, each chew has 0.85g of plant stanol esters. That makes Benecol Smart Chews $0.24 for 0.85g of plant stanols.

It’s worth comparing that to MonaVie Pulse. On one website (that I won’t mention here), I saw the market price for MonaVie Pulse to be $45.25. However, they were having a sale and a single bottle was $37.25. One bottle of MonaVie Pulse is around 25 ounces (750ml). According to MonaVie’s approved claims “Two servings of MonaVie Pulse juice (4 oz) supply 0.8g of plant sterols.” So one bottle (25 ounces) provides 6 servings (4oz) which are each 0.8g of plant sterols. At the SALE price per bottle, MonaVie Pulse is about $6.21 per 0.8g of plant sterols.

It looks like Benecol is the clear winner as I’d much rather spend $0.24 for slightly more cholesterol fighting power than MonaVie Pulse’s $6.21 price. However, I should note that the website selling MonaVie Pulse did have a bulk purchase option. If you wanted to spend $232, you could get 8 bottles of MonaVie Pulse… $29 a bottle. Even in this amount of bulk purchasing it is $4.83 per 0.8g of plant sterols. I don’t want to think about the costs of shipping 8 bottles that have to be added to that. I’d still rather pay the $0.24 with the free shipping from Amazon.

Plant Stanol Esters vs. Plant Sterol Esters

One thing that you might have noticed above is that one is plant stanols and the other is plant sterols. The stanol/sterol thing was confusing to me at first, but it seems that both are effectively the same in reducing cholesterol to the point where the same cholesterol claims can be legally made.

If you are looking for to lower your cholesterol through the use food, the choose is clear… Benecol Smart Chews are the way to go.

Originally posted 2010-02-07 03:43:55.

MonaVie Distributor Tom states “Show me any company in the world (with revenue about $1 billion a year) that has that many distributors making more than $160K a year. If you use company’s materials stick to what they say.”

Monavie states they are making $1 billion in revenue though they do not release financial information to support such claims and therefore, this statement remains unproven. See MonaVie – Is MonaVie the Fastest Company to $1 Billion Dollars in … for more information on that.

Secondly, what percentage of any revenue earned was from bona fide sales to persons not associated with the scheme and what percentage is from the investments and purchases from it’s own sales force?! Monavie do not disclose this information either however, judging by Tom’s description that he is consuming everything that he buys, as does his downline (and as does his upline whom he is duplicating), I’d say not much and it serves Monavie well to withhold such a vital piece of information from the public.

Monavie hopes the average distributor is unable to perform basic arithmetic (and this is an accurate assumption in Tom’s circumstances), however we’re able to elicit from the information provided in the 2009 Global IDS the real opportunity that Monavie represents to the average distributor/consumer (again, the distributors are the consumers).

If ALL the distributors were included in the Income disclosure statement (that is, the 87% who did not qualify for commissions – 620,431), the figures would confirm the following facts:

Total distributors = 713,139

Royal Black Diamond and above through to Bronze Executives (2570) = 0.36% of the total sales force.

The above 0.36% of distributors were paid 53% of the total commissions and averaged $1516.70 per week.

Star 1000 through to Distributor level (90,138) = 12.64% of the total sales force and averaged $37.33 per week

$37.33 per week clearly represents a LOSS when all costs are factored into (autoship, training tools, phone calls, travel, attending seminars, etc).

The remaining 620,431 distributors (87%) earned ZERO.

Clearly it’s accurate to say that 99.64% of the ENTIRE sales force LOST money.

The top weighted compensation plan is further confirmed when you consider that those ranked Royal Black Diamond and above through to Ruby Executives (377) who equate to 0.053% of the total sales force received 37.53% of the total commissions paid.

The above group of 0.053% averaged $7227.87 per week.

Even with the Gold, Silver and Bronze Executive earnings included with the remaining distributors (through to distributor level), this group of 92,331 (12.94% of the total sales force) still only averaged $49.13 per week.

Lets not forget again that 620,431 of the sales force earned absolutely ZERO.

Monavie have misrepresented the facts surrounding this farcical opportunity and fraudulently promoted a scheme whereby they elude to inform people as at the time they sign up that greater than 99% of the entire sales force are losing money.

Tom, the hypocrisy lies with a company who has policies and procedures in place which are necessary to ensure the legality of the scheme but which they do no enforce in any way at all, thus leaving the business in the incapable hands of uninformed, gullible and money driven distributors such as yourself.

Originally posted 2010-06-24 20:59:48.

It’s interesting to note that when MonaVie eMV (the regular version) became available, many MonaVie distributors said this exact statement:

A significant number of energy drinks are also available in sugar free or low carbohydrate versions. These products provide very little if any “real energy,” since energy comes from calories.

Click the link and you can find hundreds of articles with the same exact words on Google, so this had to be passed on from MonaVie in some form (hundreds of distributors wouldn’t make up the exact same page of marketing material).

I knew at the time MonaVie was going to regret using that statement. At the time it proved that MonaVie doesn’t provide energy (I’m referring to Active, Original, etc… that have few calories.)

Now it looks like the statement might come back to haunt MonaVie again. What is eMV Lite going to be? I haven’t been able to track down any information on the product itself yet. It surely can’t be low calorie version since the marketing for eMV was pretty clear in that there is “very little energy” in those drinks. MonaVie finds itself once again trapped in their own marketing web. Either they admit that they were wrong about their marketing of MonaVie eMV or they have to come out with a MonaVie eMV Lite that bends the definition of “Lite” in such a way as containing full calories. It will be interesting to see how they handle that.

I should also point out that Amthrax poses the interesting eMV Lite question of how MonaVie is going to push the no “artificial flavors or sweeteners” angle if they end up using a sugar substitute. My only guess here is that it uses Stevia or some deriviative (rebaudioside-A) that I see was approved as a food additive. That would be the smart way for MonaVie to go.

[Edit: I'm seeing another MLM energy drink, XOWii, has stevia in it. It would be very surprised if MonaVie used anything other than stevia, as stevia is the most marketable of the sweetners - since it's natural.]

Originally posted 2010-03-13 02:30:57.

However, one of the comments amazed me. It was this video clearly describing open-mindedness:

In order to have an intelligent debate on the value of MonaVie, one must recognize the concepts in the above video. Many (myself included) are open-minded about MonaVie. However, people should not accept all concepts from others on their face value. There should be scientific evidence from both sides of the debate supporting the claim.

Dozens of times in the aforementioned comments of the blog post, there have been claims of people witnessing medical situation X and attributing it to MonaVie, when there are a number of other valid explanations, such as the placebo effect. These are not scientific studies and carry no more weight for their argument than if they had said ghosts were moving the lamp shade.

Originally posted 2009-05-14 06:12:54.

I have to give credit to frequent commenter, mysterious for this for this first chart. It comes from Complete.com which is a well-known website traffic measuring source:

Monavie.com traffic according to Compete.com

You can get a recent update (assuming that you are reading this after July 28th, 2010) on Monavie Traffic by clicking here.

The interesting thing to me is that MonaVie traffic is 1/4th of what it was a year ago. Ouch. It looks like the anonymous tipster that said revenue was down more than 18% may be right.

Some MonaVie distributors will likely throw out some kind of conspiracy theory that Compete.com isn’t accurate. They’ll probably go digging up a bunch of stuff that supports that argument. In anticipation of that, I decided to add a second, even more trustworthy source… Google. Their Google Trends product can tell you how much interest there is in something overtime. It does this by analyzing the data on billions of daily searches… a vast sample size. What does Google say about the interesting in MonaVie? It’s fading.

Interest in MonaVie according to Google Trends

Looking at the chart, you can see MonaVie has been fading since the beginning of 2009. Interest is the currently the same as it was in early 2007… just one year after it started showing up on Google’s radar.

“The shipping bill of lading from November 2008 (#MAEU857273697) shows that EarthFruits received a large shipment containing drums of solids originating from Balboa, Panama (a port city located at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal) and arriving in Los Angeles.”

The shipper was Bela Iaca Ind. E Com. Polpas de Frutas Ltda. [translation; Beautiful Acai Fruit Pulps Ltd.]. Bela Iaca Ltd (located in Castanhal, Brazil) was founded in 2003 and manufactures fruit purees that are shipped to buyers worldwide. Their products include acai puree (available in 180 kg drums) as well as bacuri, cacau, camu-camu, cupuaçu, acerola, passion fruit, pineapple, guava, cashew, taperebá, soursop, lime, muruci, uxi, and mango.

A search for other bills of lading from Bela Iaca uncovered a shipment (#MAEU853684299) on February 23, 2007 of 260 drums (roughly 25 tons) of “frozen acai refined and pasteurized with 12% solids added with citric acid”. This shipment was also to Los Angeles and originated in Panama. The receiver of the shipment was…[drum roll please]…MONARCH HEALTH SCIENCES (now doing business as Monavie LLC).

Note also that the manufacturer specifies that the acai is only 12% solids, which represents lowto mid-grade acai (Type B). The same company also offers higher-grade versions, which apparently Monavie LLC was too cheap to pay for. These include a version that contains more than 14% acai solids (Type A) as well as an even higher-grade organic version.”

So here we have a forensic trail that tells us pretty much exactly how and where Monavie really gets (or got) their acai. As I [Vogel] speculated a long while back, they purchase cheap frozen acai pulp in 180 kg drums from an unaffiliated non-exclusive bulk supplier in Brazil. The drums of acai puree are then shipped by slow boat to Panama, where it is unloaded and transferred to another ship for slow transport to Los Angeles. After arriving in LA, the drums of acai puree are shipped overland by truck to the bottling facility in Utah. Monavie LLC has nothing to do with the harvesting or processing of the acai berries and they aren’t freeze-dried within 24-48 hours of picking.

Of course the big take-away here is in that last paragraph. MonaVie distributors like to say that MonaVie is there harvesting the acai. This is obviously not true. They like to say that they get the best quality acai. Again, the company they buy from has better quality available. MonaVie distributors like to say that MonaVie is there freeze-drying the acai to keep it fresh. That doesn’t seem to be the case either.

Huh, so how about those berries?

Originally posted 2010-03-21 15:18:47.

MonaVie says that it can’t disclose the amount of acai in it’s blend because it would be giving up a trade secret. In theory, someone else could use the information to help decode part of the MonaVie’s secret recipe.

One thing we do know, açai is the first ingredient on the MonaVie label. With 18 other fruits in the juice, there’s likely at least 5.3% açai. As a consumer, one should take a skeptical look with their money and not assume there’s any more than that. I don’t know anyone who drinks Coca-cola for health. They pay a small amount of money for the taste. The ingredients or secret recipe is not important to the value that one receives in buying Coke if they just want good taste. If MonaVie wants to bill itself as something that tastes great and price itself similar to Coke, I’m fine with that. If it wants to bill itself as a healthy beverage, it should have to show why it’s healthier than other competing beverages at less than 1/10th the cost (like V8 Fusion Açai Berry).

It is my belief that a premium price requires proof of a lot of premium ingredients. Is that what’s in MonaVie? Only MonaVie knows, and they aren’t saying.

Originally posted 2009-03-07 10:32:23.

One thing that I found interesting is that you don’t even get the trunk that’s in the picture. Why call it a trunk of tools and put a picture of a trunk, if there’s no trunk? It’s marketing designed to confuse the buyer. It would have been a lot more accurate to just take a picture of the tools themselves.

If TEAM wasn’t trying to steal your money with it’s trunk trick, Amthrax has shown that the trunks are a waste of money. Many would agree that the sales tools are a waste of money, but he points out that you can buy all the items in the trunks for less than the bundled package. Who has heard of paying more for buying a bulk package? If I buy in bulk, I expect to get a discount, not a surcharge.

Clearly anyone who is buying these trunks are not making a wise purchasing decision… and the seller looks bad by trying to pull a fast one on his customers.

Originally posted 2009-05-25 06:04:52.

“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.

Originally posted 2010-06-13 12:06:33.