272. When Is It Time to Refresh Your Packaging?

0:01Welcome to Startup to Scale, a podcast by FoodBevy. I'm your host, Jordan Buckner. Join me as I talk to aspiring entrepreneurs, seasoned industry experts, and everyone in between as we unlock the keys to growing from startup to scale.

0:19Packaging can make or break a consumer's first impression of your product. But for founders, redesigning the packaging is rarely as simple as making it look better. You have to balance retailer expectations, how consumers think about the product, the impact on shelf positioning and growth goals, all while making sure you don't actually lose what made people pick up the product in the first place. So today I want to invite on Chris Jane, who is going through that process with his brand Proper Good. He's had to evaluate what's working, what wasn't, and how the packaging could better support the next stage of growth.

0:55Chris, I want to welcome you back to the show. you were last on five years ago, episode 17, back in November of 2021. So good to see you. Wow, man. Thanks for inviting me back. Episode 17, one of the OGs. That's awesome. I know. You're like right at the beginning and this will be like 250 something. So you are like right up there in a internal comes back. But I always tell people like, I want to check in, see how things are going later. So this is a check-in episode as well. I say we should put a calendar invite for episode 500 in a couple of years. I like it. I like it. So for those who aren't as familiar with Proper Good, give me a quick overview of what the product is.

1:35Yep. So the goal of Proper Good when we started was to essentially reinvent the ready-to-eat shelf-stable soup set. So I think obviously all the brands you know in canned that have been around for 100 years, we thought we could do that better in terms of pack format or in a pouch instead of a can. Cleaner ingredients, higher protein, no added sugar, et cetera, right? Essentially a modern take on ready-to-eat soup was how the business started. And then that evolved into some other categories as well. But soup remains to be the focus of the business. So, yeah, we do a lot online and retail, of course, all within that focus of shelf stable, ready to eat soup.

2:06And I remember when we first talked, you had really grown the e-commerce business. There were some exciting things going on there. And Walmart had kind of come along as one of your large customers, right, to really expand. And so take me back in terms of like what that relationship has been like of selling your product in Walmart stores. past the country. Yeah, it's a long story. So I'll keep it short. But you're right. We started as DTC. That was, you know, we launched right during COVID. So that was part function of just the way things were. And also it gave us a lot of focus. So we launched DTC, did our first few million soups DTC, and then honestly took a swing to go into retail in a big way.

2:42So we partnered with Walmart actually as our first retail customer, which is obviously quite unusual. And it was funny because we felt we proved the brand DTC, right? Got to tens of thousands of reviews, got to a good repeat rate, that kind of thing. But the CAC environment was challenging. you know how often do you buy soup online either on a subscription or just generally repeat it's not obviously the same as a supplement in terms of LTV so it just got to the point of we felt we'd really landed on something that was going to work but retail was really going to be the dollar driver yeah so we partnered with Walmart we launched with Walmart a bunch of items and that's expanded since so now we have you know over 10 items nationally with Walmart in the soup and other categories.

3:18As you've been helping to build that out at Walmart what were some of the kind of really exciting opportunities that came from that, but then were also some of the challenges of having this expanded retail footprint. Yeah, I think not to oversimplify, but it's all the stuff that you and your listeners would know in that obviously you've got price pack architecture, you've got the visuals on shelf, you've got all of the stuff that makes a CPG product either win or fail, essentially, right? And I think we always believed that what was inside the product was good, right? We knew that from the repeat rate from the reviews, but going from direct to consumer where you have obviously the ability for landing pages and videos and all the fun stuff that we do to in-store in dozens of states across thousands of you know we've got dozen aisles in the thing we've got you know 20 inches in aisle whatever it is in a random city we've never been to how do you try and sell a product in that store and i think that was obviously the biggest opportunity and challenge at the same time essentially they're two sides of the same coin so there was a huge learning curve going from d2c to retail i would say with the central belief that the same product could work but the pack and price architecture was likely going to be a big, big challenge.

4:20And, you know, we can talk through obviously all the branding stuff we're about to. And I think it's a good story. I think there were so many iterative learnings going through that process. And, you know, we've been in Walmart, what is it, three, maybe longer years now. And every year we've made improvements in all of the things I just mentioned. Yeah, I think one thing that I've always been impressed by with you is your kind of data driven approach to understand what's working. I remember there's some story about you launched a new suit and the repeat rate was below what other products were doing and you like survey customers and it turned out that there was an ingredient that people didn't didn't really like in there was this is polarizing actually just as a normal food yeah you're correct it was time yes the herb time is you know for a certain percentage of the population in the same way cilantro some people think it tastes like soap right it's the same deal in that you either don't notice it and it just becomes a sort of blend in a normal sort of herb seasoning or you really notice it and you absolutely hate it and so that was again it's just one of those silly learning curves as you know we just you go through it and you're like yeah on reflection why why is that even in there right there's plenty other ways to get a nice flavor without that ingredient and yeah it was a classic data-led story of reached out to i don't know a thousand people online that bought it once but didn't buy it again you survey them find out time was polarizing we make a v2 of the product and solve the repeat rate because obviously the benefit of ddc early on is the data is both detailed but it's also pretty much instant right you can just you can just work so fast.

5:44Yeah. And you can make pretty quick changes when you're controlling all the inventory and everything. Yep. Exactly. Tell me how you've taken that data approach to your growth and Walmart. Are you still kind of looking at similar types of data in terms of like growth and stores and really see where things are performing well and how to optimize it? Yeah, it's two sides of it. It's one on the front end of what do you want the category to be, right? So if you look at soup and specifically, there's a lot of what I would just call legacy, legacy brands, legacy formats, legacy flavors. So the question is, would you just totally turn that on its head?

6:16And, you know, we have some items like a cheeseburger soup or a pizza soup, which initially sounds like an incredible idea, right? So just bringing totally new innovation to the category, something that no consumers had before in a retail product. But the problem is those consumers aren't necessarily looking for that, right? If you're going for your shopping list, it's, you know, I'm probably going to get my chicken noodle or my tomato basil. So you end up with two sides of it where we end up with core flavors. Obviously, we make tomato, basil, things like that. They'll end up being the core drivers of most of the revenue.

6:44But things like a cheeseburger or something like that really bring in a new incremental customer, right? It's 100 % incremental to the category, of course, because it's the only item like it. So you get two sides, like what is driving the core of the business from a revenue point of view, but then what is also exciting to bring new customers to the... So soup's an unusually large category that hasn't had a lot of innovation. So we just got to really play with that. And we did that in tandem with Walmart and obviously other partners of just, you know, we want to innovate in so many ways. Again, it's a different pack format.

7:12It's a different brand look. It's a different ingredient profile. It's a different price. But you don't want to innovate just for the sake of innovation, right? There has to be obviously a strategy behind it. So we test and learn. I mean, we probably launched 20 different products in partnership with Walmart before we landed on sort of ones that we felt were the right ones to continue scaling. So as you were growing, you also kind of hit a challenge of questioning, you know, there might be time to refresh the packaging or redesign it. And so I'm curious, what were some of the first signs that your existing packaging might not be serving the brand as well as it once had?

7:42Yeah. So there's been a sort of two-step iteration process. The first one, for anyone who's not familiar, is our DTC packaging, right? Again, it's in a flexible stand-up pouch, sort of tear the top off and microwave it. And that's as easy as that. It was about 50 % transparent, right? So you could really see the inside soup on the front and then it had a sort of top header card on it. And what was cool about that for DTC is you can sort of highlight the transparency, both in packaging and ingredients. You can put, you know, arrows to point to, you know, gluten-free or whatever it is. The problem is when it's sat on a shelf for a long time, right?

8:10Things like soup and other things like that settle, right? They settle. So they don't look particularly great in terms of just sat there for a while on shelves. Second, it's you started to hit more of a health consumer online, right? Again, we were keto, gluten-free focused at the beginning, which worked great from an ad and landing page point of view. In a retail shelf, most people aren't shopping for that, right? Maybe if you're going to a specific section, potentially, but generally most consumers aren't looking for that. So it became a little polarizing, right? It became a transparent packaging in a different format with a lot of health-focused attributes.

8:42It was just too much. It was just too much for the general center store in a normal retailer. So the first big iteration was how do we fix that? And that is, as I'm sure many of your listeners would know it's focusing on brand flavor etc so that was iteration one which we could dive into but iteration two is kind of where we are now well that's really exciting because then you know iteration one i guess tell me about like the core things that you were trying to achieve with that so you got rid of the window right where's some of the other changes that you made to the package yeah so try to make it a lot simpler right the front was very busy honestly for d2c and if you look up there's there's some on our website and a blog i think the old packaging versus new packaging, you'll see it was just a lot busier, right?

9:20There was just a lot more going on where, you know, most people, as we know, are making a decision to pick up a product within a few seconds. They're probably noticing it from a few feet away. So how do you optimize for that? And of course, it's, they want to see, it's got to stand out from a vibrancy and shape and so on point of view. But when they look at it, then they need to know what it is and why to buy it, right? So we'd really try to say, well, from four feet away, how do you make it bright? So we went for like full color flood, you know, tomatoes, bright red, chicken noodles, bright orange, et cetera.

9:48So from, you know, from a decent distance away, it just catches your eye. It does, especially in an aisle that is 90 % cans. So that was great. We solved that. Two, when you pick it up, it has a brand flair to it, right? Nice big logo, nice big picture of a bowl of soup. Like it really communicated flavor. The challenge is, which we'll get to the next iteration in a minute, I'm sure. But that was really V1. It was how do we focus a lot less on health claims, right? Again, it's the same liquid inside and they're still on there, but they're secondary instead that are primary. So it was really trying to fix hierarchy of verbiage.

10:18And it's funny, if you actually look at the first one, a lot of the items are all the same size font, like literally on the original DTC packaging, you look at it and you're like, wow, how do we think that was a good idea? Like all of the wording is the same size. So there was almost no sort of hierarchy. Yeah, there you go. You pulled it up on screen. Yeah, yeah. The flavors and one version of the before and after so that we can kind of see that. But, you know, I've always loved like the branding is very bright. It's very bold. But, you know, It can also see how a D2C consumer even or in retail can have a different experience, right?

10:49Because you can take the perfect product picture, but then when that packaging is on the shelf, it doesn't always look like the picture does and can really change. So definitely understand that. So you worked with our FoodBevvy sponsor, EOSpace, to conduct a packaging audit. I'm curious, what stood out to you most about their assessment of your existing design? Yeah, it was great guys over there. They reached out. And, you know, we had done some interesting data research with Walmart, right? We worked with the Walmart Data Ventures team. We'd done some consumer surveys and we could talk more about that.

11:19Essentially, we were noodling on it internally. The latest iteration that you just had on screen really won from things you said. It was vibrant. It looked tasty. It was all of that. But we had actually uncovered some new problems, right? By removing the transparency, people didn't know it was ready to eat because you couldn't see that it was a wet product because it was now fully colored. A few things like that had come up and we had been noodling on it internally. And then the guys there reached out to us. So we just started a project and they did a free audit for us, right? Did a sort of a four or five page PDF review.

11:48We had a nice 30 minute call where it was clear they were designing for what you mentioned at the very beginning of the call of like what makes a product actually work in CPG, right? There's a very different thing between some that looks aesthetically pleasing and just like cool or whatever versus like functions on a shelf for the purpose, which is obviously to drive velocity. So yeah, they clearly understood that. And I think in our iteration, we'd gone a little too far making it beautiful and not quite far enough focusing on what was going to convert on shelf. Yeah. Were there any kind of specific pieces of feedback from that audit that maybe surprised you or challenged the assumptions?

12:24Because, of course, after you like finish one design, you're like, OK, this is great. This is what's going to make it work for us. Then you can see how it performs on a shelf. I'd love to, one, get into the data after this, but two, like are there any kind of feedback pieces that kind of challenge those assumptions? Yeah, I think it's funny because we're, as founders, very self-challenging, honestly. So we very sort of rarely fall in love with our own creation, if you will. Like we knew there was a challenge to be solved. So it was more that their insights validated what I already knew was the direction to go.

12:54But they obviously crystallized it in a way that it was, hey, you know, compared to the hundred other packs we've sort of worked on, there's problems here in hierarchy, there's problems here in contrast, there's problems here in too many fonts, for example, like things like that. So we knew we weren't doing a full brand overhaul, right? We're very happy, again, as you mentioned, with the vibrancy and the feel and the general sort of life to it. But there are a lot of what I would just call more functional and operational tweaks that could make it perform better, which, you know, which is what we focused on with them.

13:19Tell me a little bit about the data that you collected with the Walmart team and from consumer surveys. So I know you mentioned that fact about consumers didn't understand it was ready to eat, right? Because sometimes the soup category will come with a dry, freeze-dried pieces, and then people have to add water and kind of lightly cook it. And so it could have been a product like that. What kind of other lessons did you learn from that? Yeah, it was interesting. Exactly right. So we did, I think it was about 500 different consumers. And what's nice about the platform, you can divide it by, you know, current purchases and also people who've never purchased your brand, but maybe have purchased XYZ other brands, right?

13:50So you can do very sort of targeted approach to the surveying. I think we had about 30 questions in there, including some mock-ups, including some things like that. And what was very, very clear was about 30%, let's call it a third of new people to the brand, did not know we were ready to eat. To your point, they assumed we would just add water in terms of a dried product. Now, interesting, right? The whole point of Proper Good is that we've done the work for you, right? It's ready to eat. It's wet. It's fully cooked. The texture is amazing. It's just like you made it at home. So that obviously is a cost on our end to cook and ship a wet product.

14:19And that obviously, in theory, helps justify the price point on shelf. So if a third of people don't know that, that's a real problem, right? That's a legitimate size problem. So that came about. And then the second piece was it was visually appealing from four feet away. Again, bright, vibrant colors, like people enjoy the pouch format. We validated all of that. But they weren't instantly clear what it was. And it's funny, if you have that picture that you brought up a minute ago, you'll see the proper good logo is enormous on the pack, which from a brand block point of view is great. Right. It looks awesome.

14:49It's uniform. It's very clear, same brand. But if you actually look there, soup is very small at the top. Right. Right. That which is it sounds so obvious now we're saying it. But this is, you know, we are a soup company and the word soup is a quarter of the size of our logo. Right. So you realize, right, like people don't always read from top to bottom. They're not reading everything. They're kind of picking and choosing usually like what's the biggest or what stands out. And then it might miss some text. Yep. And you put it through sort of a high contrast sort of heat map software, right? Some great AI stuff that'll do that for you in terms of colors and contrast and so on.

15:20And you'll see, yeah, on first two seconds from a few feet away, what is visible? And what is not visible is that it's a ready to eat soup, which is our whole proposition, right? So there's a fundamental just challenge there. Again, we weren't looking for a full overhaul, so we were happy with many elements. But those two things, the ready to eat nature of the product and also then just showing that it's, you know, it's very simply a tomato basil soup was not as obvious as it should be. And those were the two key things we wanted to solve. And then also the last one was we'd lost a little bit of the playfulness, right?

15:52Online, you know, we're a young brand. We're a fun brand. We do a lot of consumer drops, a lot of consumer work. That wasn't that clear from the packaging, right? It became a little bit too commodity. So we wanted to try and infuse sort of 10, 20 % more playfulness. I mean, even though in the old packaging, you had this little like smiling spoon icon, which it's hard to justify like how, what that actually does for the brand, right? But as you mentioned, it kind of goes back to some of that, the playfulness. That's exactly right. And on the back, we had like inspiring quotes that we came up with, just silly, silly things, right that don't necessarily scale but just just a little bit of again a founder fun right if we can do stuff a little bit different to the legacy brands we should and some of that had got lost so we wanted to bring some of that back yeah so once you decided to move forward with eos space what was the redesign process like and working with our team yeah the key to all of this is of course clarity and being clear about what you're looking for like we were very clear we weren't looking for a rebrand we wanted continuity was key for us right we didn't want to say you know if you buy proper good today or you buy proper good when the new packaging is out there can be no confusion right so say same photography same colors same size same you know all of that sort of thing we needed strong continuity because we already have a lot of distribution basis but within that that's your kind of boundaries within that have a play with it and try and solve as i mentioned the ready to eat piece and the clarity of soup flavor so i believe i haven't got it in front of me but i believe the guys came up with it was somewhere between five and ten iterations of like hey here's a few directions we could go.

17:19And obviously, for anyone who's gone through a packaging project, that's the most fun bit, right? Because you just let someone else's brain come up with a bunch of ideas. And some of them didn't match what we were imagining at all, but that in itself is useful. And some of them, you go, that bit's nice from that one, that bit's nice from that one, and you sort of go through that process. So yeah, I think they took a few weeks to come back with, let's just call it five totally different directions for us to then bring the next level of input to. That's exciting. And the final package has been designed, but it's not yet released.

17:48So we're not going to quite announce it right now. We'll have to come back and share that. But from it, what are some of the most important improvements compared to kind of the current version? Yeah, I think it's honestly, it's a combination of all the stuff we just discussed. And it's, you know, all of this entrepreneurship and CPG, especially, right? It's that kind of drunken walk towards product market fit, as they call it of like, again, from day one, we've been confident on the category, the brand visual, the pack format, the liquid inside the pouch. We've had no, you know, great, great data around that and no pushback on any of that.

18:16But what's funny is, you know, when you look at a shelf, again, if you have a lot of distribution as a small brand, the pack really does a lot of the heavy lifting, right? We can't, we can't go and do founder demos in 3 ,000 stores. We can't support with shelf merchandising in 3 ,000 stores. What we can do is try to optimize price pack architecture. It's fun. There's a firm out of the UK, I like, you know, from the UK originally called Big Fish. And they have a video on YouTube about pack-vertising, as in advertising, but pack-vertising. And the whole concept there is that at the end of the day, for most consumers, the pack is the advertising, right?

18:48And that really resonates with us. I suspect, you know, if you've got$100 million to spend, it's a little different. But if you don't, At the end of the day, the pack has to do the majority of the advertising for the new consumer. So how do we optimize that? And that was a key theme through everything we did here of just, again, this is an iteration. It's not a rebrand. So it was, how do we just make sure that, you know, instead of a third of people being confused, it'd be great if only 2 % of people were confused, right? Like something like that. It's obviously never going to be perfect, but really just keep those North Stars in mind.

19:18And again, the new pack, it looks, you know, I'd say 80 % similar. You won't be confused by the brand or the colors or the shapes, but you'll see instantly, oh, yeah, it's a ready to eat tomato basil soup. That is hitting what my brain was looking for. And obviously that's the goal. You know, that's so key. I always tell a story with my previous brand, T-Squares. We were doing a demo at Whole Foods once. A customer comes up to me and they said, hey, I saw these on the shelf the other day. I picked it up and looked at it, but I didn't buy it because they couldn't understand what the product was in three seconds.

19:50It caused more confusion than they're willing to process in that moment. And then at the demo table, they tasted it, they tried it, I told them the story, and they were like, oh, these are great, and they bought it. But to your point, the packaging was not doing its job. It was failing to convert a customer who was genuinely interested in what the product was. And so if you miss that, you miss out on the chance to add more consumers and drive more sales and velocity. Yep, without a doubt. It's as simple as that, right? And it's so true. And yet I think there are plenty of packages out there we could all identify on the shelf that could be, to your point, just better designed.

20:25They just could be. And design is not just pretty colors. It's designing for the function, which is to educate a new customer, to give it a try. And hopefully your product quality stands up and the repeat kind of takes care of itself. But yeah, to your point, it's so upsetting as a founder when you hear someone picked up your product and put it back down because they didn't understand it. That must have been an annoying moment. You know, it was. I think you said the key thing. Someone should be able to pick it up and say, hey, this is a ready-to-eat tomato basil soup. Like, I can decide if that's for me or if it's not for me, but I 100 % understand what it is.

20:55Yep. Couldn't agree more. And I think the guys at EO did a great job with that sort of framework. In general, what kind of watchouts or warnings would you give to anyone who is considering going through a package redesign for their brand? Yeah, that's a lovely question. I would say, I think you have to live in the knowledge that it's probably never done, right? It's never final. And I think for us, this is, I say iteration three, it's probably iteration four when you actually think of like some other minor tweaks along the way. And as of right now, if we sit in a room, we look at it and we say, it's absolutely perfect.

21:29I promise by the time it arrives and it gets on the shelf, I will not think that. And that's okay, right? That honestly, it's part of the fun. Like you should have fun living in that unknown. Like this is a push to work on things that we find interesting and i think you have to evolve with consumer changes i think my one caution i would say just because you did ask for a caution is to not anchor the brand on at least front of pack on a particular attribute i think we all know consumers are fickle fads change trends change whenever i see a brand where the main front of pack is related to say i don't know glp ones or protein or keto or something i think that's a risky place to be because it takes you a long time to change it.

22:07FAT can change overnight. I definitely hear you. So I'm excited to see the new package once it launches. Let me know. We'll be blasting it out so that everyone can see. And you also have just launched nationwide in Target as some other stores like Fresh Time. So congratulations on those launches as well. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's been a fun year. We're taking all our Walmart success to a lot of other retailers. So yeah, by end of year, you can find us in most of the big major accounts, which is great. Well, Chris, thanks so much for being on and sharing the story of the the new packaging design if anyone's interested in getting their package audit to see how you can improve definitely check out eospace i'll put a link in the show notes as well but they're doing free packaging audits and as chris mentioned like it's really in-depth it's not just like a quick call that will actually look through all details of your product packaging your brand front and back how you tell your story so that you can come out with a better position product designed for conversion and getting people to actually pick up and bye.

23:02Chris, thanks so much again for being on. Perfect. Thanks.