272. When Is It Time to Refresh Your Packaging?

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?

Yeah, so there's been a sort of two-step iteration process.

The first one, for anyone who's not familiar, is our D2C 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 D2C 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 sat 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, 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.

It 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, 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 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? What are 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 some on our website and a blog, I think the old packaging versus new packaging, and 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.

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 tried to say, 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, etc.