272. When Is It Time to Refresh Your Packaging?

Speaker A: Welcome 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. Packaging 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 consumer 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 Jain 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. Chris, I wanna welcome you back to the show you were last on five years ago, episode 17 back in November of 2020, 2021. So good to see you.

Speaker B: Wow man, thanks for inviting me back. Episode 17, one of the OGs. That's awesome.

Speaker A: I know you're like right at the beginning and this will be like 250something. So you are like right up there in internally, uh, 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.

Speaker B: I say we should put a calendar invite for episode 500 in a couple years. So that'll be.

Speaker A: 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. Yep.

Speaker B: So the goal of Propaganda 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. 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.

Speaker A: And I remember when it we first talked, you had, you know, 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, you know, large customers. Right. To really expand and so take me back in terms of like what that relationship's been like of uh, Selling your product in Walmart stores across the country.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It's a long story, so I'll keep it, keep it short. But you're right, we started as D2C. That was, you know, we launched right during COVID So that was part, part function of just the way things were and also it gave us a lot of focus. So yeah, we launched D2C, did our first few million soups, D2 and then honestly took a swing to go into retail in a big way. So 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.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: 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, with Walmart in the soup and other categories.

Speaker A: As you've been having the built 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.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think not, 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 stu a CPG product either 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 got dozen aisles in the thing, we 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. And 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.

Speaker A: 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 soup 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. There's this polarizing actually just as a normal food.

Speaker B: Yeah, you're correct. It was time. Yeah. So the, the herb, um, 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 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, uh, it's just one of those silly learning curves as you know, just you go through it and you're like, yeah, on reflection, why, why is that even in there? Right. There's plenty of 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 DTC early on is the data is both detailed, but it's also pretty much instant.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: You can just work so fast.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you can make pretty quick changes when you're controlling all the inventory and everything.

Speaker B: Yep, exactly.

Speaker A: Tell me how you've kind of taken that data approach to your growth in Walmart. Are you still kind of looking at similar types of um, data in terms of like growth and stores to really see where things are performing well and how to optimize it?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's two sides of it. It's one on the, on the front end of what do you want the category to be? Right. So if you look at soup in specifically, there's a lot I would just call legacy, legacy brands, legacy formats, legacy flavors. So the question is, would you just totally turn that on its head and you know, we have some items like a cheeseburger soup or a pizza soup, which initially sounds like an incredible idea. I say we just bring in 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 the most of the revenue. But 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 have just, you know, we want to innovate in so many ways. Again, it's a different pack format, it'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, we probably launched 20 different products, um, in partnership with Walmart before we landed on sort of ones that we felt were the right ones to continue scaling.

Speaker A: So as you were growing, you also kind of hit a challenge of questioning, you know, it 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?

Speaker B: Yeah. So there's been a sort of two step iteration process. The first one, um, 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.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: 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 on a shelf for a long time. Right. Things 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 shelf. 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.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: It came a transparent packaging in a different format with a lot of health focused attributes was just too much. It was just too much for the general center store in a, in a normal retailer. So the first big iteration was how do we fix that? And that is, you know, 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, uh, iteration two is kind of where we are now.

Speaker A: Well, that's really exciting because, 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. Were some of the other changes that you made to the package.

Speaker B: Yeah. So try to make it a lot simpler.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: The front was very Busy, honestly for D2C, 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. There 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. Um, 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 really tried to say, well, well, from four feet away, how do you make it bright? So we went for like full color flood bright, you know, Tomatoes, bright red chicken noodles, bright orange, et cetera. So 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 sold that too. When you pick it up, it has a brand flair to it.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: 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. Their secondary instead of primary. So it was really trying to fix hierarchy of verbiage. And 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 D2C packaging, you look at it and you're like, wow, how do we. 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.

Speaker A: I'll showcase.

Speaker B: Yeah, there you go. You pulled it up on screen. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Flavors and one version of the before and after so that we can kind of, um, 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, how a D2C consumer, even or in retail can have a different experience. Right. Because you could 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 Food Bevy sponsor, EO Space, to conduct a packaging audit. I'm curious what stood out to you most about their assessment of your existing design?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it was great. Guys over there, they reached out, um, and you know, we had done some interesting data research with Walmart.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: We worked with the Walmart Data Ventures team. We've done some consumer surveys and we talk more about that. Essentially, we. We were noodling on it internally that the latest iteration that, 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. Cause 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, um, there reached out to us. So we just started a project and they did, they did a free audit for us. Right. Did a sort of a four or five page PD. We 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.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: There's a very different thing between something 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 had gone a little too far making it beautiful and not quite far enough focusing on what was going to convert on shelf.

Speaker A: Yeah. Were there any kind of specific pieces of feedback from that audit that maybe surprised you or challenged the assumptions? Because of course after you like finish one design you're like okay, this is great. This is what's going to make it work for us. Then you can see how it performs on itself. I'd love to 1 get into the data after this but to like are there any kind of feedback pieces that kind of challenge those assumptions?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's funny because we're, we're as found as very self challenging honestly. So we, we very sort of rarely fall in love with our own creation if you will. Like we, we knew there was a uh, challenge to be solved so it was more that their insights validated what I already said knew was the direction to go. But 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 if 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.

Speaker A: Tell me about a little bit about the data that you collected with the Walmart team and from consumer. 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 dry 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?

Speaker B: 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 purchasers and also people who've never purchased your brand but maybe have purchased XYZ other brand. Right. So you can do very sort of targeted approach to the surveying. I think we had about 30 questions in there, including some mock ups doing 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 are ready to eat that to your point, they assumed we would just add water in terms of a dried product. How interesting. Right. The whole point of Propagood 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. And 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. Problem. Right. That's uh, that's the 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, is enormous on the pack which from a brand block point of view is great. Right. It looks awesome. It's uniform, it's very clear. Same brand. But if you actually look there, soup is very small at the top. Right, Right. 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 uh, logo. Right.

Speaker A: 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 biggest or what stands out. And then they might miss some text.

Speaker B: Yep. And you put it through sort of a, uh, 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. And 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 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. 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. Those were two. 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. Online. You know, we're. We're a young brand, we're a fun brand. We do, you know, a lot of consumer drops, a lot of consumer work that wasn't that from the packaging. Right. It became a little bit too commodity. So we wanted to try and infuse sort of 10, 20% more playfulness.

Speaker A: I mean, even loving the old packaging, you had this little, uh, 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 of.

Speaker B: That's exactly right. And on the back, we had, like, inspiring quotes that we came up with. Just silly, silly things.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: 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.

Speaker A: Yeah. So once you decide to move forward with EOS space, what was the redesign process like? And working with our team.

Speaker B: 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's out, there can be no confusion. Right. So 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 souk 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 10 iterations of like, hey, here's a few directions we could go on. 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, uh, in itself is useful. And some of them, you go, well, that bit's nice from that one, that bit is 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, bring the next level of input to.

Speaker A: That's exciting. And the final package has been designed, but it's not yet released, so 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, um, of the current version?

Speaker B: Yeah, Ah, I think it's honest. It's a combination of all the stuff we just discussed and it's, you know, all of this entrepreneurship and CPG especially. Right. Is that kind of drunken warp 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. But what's funny is, you know, when you look at a shelf, again, like, 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 three 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 from the uk, originally called Big Fish, and they have a video on YouTube about packvertising, as in advertising. But packvertising and the whole concept there is that at the end of the day, for most consumers, the pack is the advertising. Right. And that really resonates with us, especially, 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. And 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 based soup that is hitting what my brain was looking for. And obviously that that's the goal, you

Speaker A: know, that's so key. I was telling 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, um, 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. It 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're like, oh, these are great. And they bought, 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.

Speaker B: 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.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: They just could be. And design is not just. Yeah, it's not just pretty colors. Right. 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.

Speaker A: You know, it was, I think usually 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.

Speaker B: Yep, couldn't agree more. And that I think the guys, um, did a great job with that sort of framework.

Speaker A: In general, what kind of watch watch outs or warnings would you give to anyone who is considering going through a package redesign for their brand.

Speaker B: 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 is 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, I promise, by the time it arrives and it gets on shelf, I will not think that.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: And that's. And that's okay, right? That. Honestly, that's part of the fun. Like, you should have have fun living in that unknown. Like, this is a place 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 the 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, GLP1s or protein or keto or something, I think that's a risky place to be because it takes you a long time to change and can change overnight.

Speaker A: Uh, 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 at some other stores like freshtime. So congratulations on those launches as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's been a fun year. We're taking all our, uh, 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.

Speaker A: Well, Chris, thanks so much for being on and sharing the story of the new packaging design. If anyone's interested in getting, uh, their package audit to see how you can improve, definitely check out EO Space. 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 lets you 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 buy. Chris, thanks so much again for being on.

Speaker B: Perfect. Thanks.