How Proper Good is Making the Soup Aisle Cool Again with Chris Jane

Chris Jane (0:00)

If you pick up a can or a similar shelf-stable meal, you might notice a lot of the ingredients are actually banned in dozens of countries around the world. So we started Proper Good to solve that problem.

Mike Gelb (0:08)

We're gonna make soup in a pouch. Hear me out. That's how Chris Jane pitched his sister on what became Proper Good. The food startup that offers convenient shelf-stable meals. They launched in the middle of the pandemic and have since scaled V2C, got a Shark Tank deal with Mark Cuban, and nationally launched at Walmart. Today, Proper Good is redefining convenience food for modern consumers.

Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show. How are you?

Chris Jane (0:37)

Ben, I'm doing great. This is going to be the highlight of the day. I love it. Oh, stop.

Mike Gelb (0:41)

Oh, stop. I really, really do appreciate you though, taking the time. Really appreciate you taking the time. Take me to April 2020 though. Take me to April 2020 The world is shutting down. Supply chains are in chaos and nobody knew what was coming.

Most founders would have hit a pause in terms of launching new brands, but you decided not to. Why did you decide this was the perfect time to launch Proper Good?

Chris Jane (1:07)

Yeah. I mean, when you put it like that, it sounds like a crazy idea.

Yeah. We had been working on it for probably about six to nine months in the background at the time, right? And then obviously COVID came out of the left field as a curve ball for everyone, but it was interesting. I mean, we sell shelf stable, shippable food. So there was an argument that COVID at the beginning, at least helped us from an awareness and an e-commerce point of view. So yeah, it was actually, honestly, we were the kind of the train had left the station as we started in April 2020 Things were already in motion for sure.

Mike Gelb (1:40)

So was that actually, I guess you alluded to it, but that actually end up becoming a benefit for you all?

Chris Jane (1:47)

I think it is a funny one, right? The hindsight is obviously 2020, but I would say what it did was laser focus everything we were doing, right? I ran a previous brand a few years before that, and we did all the things, right? Farmers markets, local stores and so on, trade shows that we all know. You couldn't do any of that, right? There was none of that. So it was like, okay, we've got this product, we've got this brand, we're going to sell it online, and that's kind of the channel we're going after.

For better or worse, it laser focused everything we were doing. And I mean, once you start selling your first few hundred thousand dollars online, you get your first few thousand reviews, you start to really feel like, oh, this is good, people are interested in what we're making here. So I would argue in hindsight, it probably did help for the focus in the first year.

Mike Gelb (2:26)

So how did you then approach online, since that was the only channel that you could do? Because food and beverage notoriously, it's very, very hard. Like that mixed with online, a lot of the time it just doesn't go just because basket sizes are too small and what have you. How did you think about it?

Chris Jane (2:44)

Yeah, it's funny, I wish I had a picture to share with you, but I remember literally in the dorm room of my MBA, we were buying all the different box sizes, right? From UPS and USPS, all the rest of it. Figuring out how many meals, should it be 10 ounces, 12 ounces, et cetera? Figure out, do you do zone-based pricing? Do you do et cetera? All of that. And it got to the point of the meals, they're in a flexible pouch. If anyone's not familiar, we make ready to eat soups and things like that in flexible packaging.

Those you can actually get a lot. You can get like 10 meals in a shoe box, right? Essentially. So when you actually do like the cost per pound of shipping that, it actually got to the point of, wait a minute, the AOV doesn't have to be that high. And we can probably offer free shipping at a reasonable threshold to make the DTC economics work. But your point, you know, heavy cans and frozen and things like that is a whole different game, but shelf stable, flexible pouches in a box is actually pretty efficient DTC.

Mike Gelb (3:33)