Progress Update No. 04 - New Packaging Goes Live

Why Change Was Desperately Needed

As a reminder, the Mushroom Coffee product received good customer feedback but the packaging unfortunately sucked.
I over-complicated it (more about that here) and it ended up not protecting the powder enough once open...not ideal!
At its worst, the Mushroom Coffee would turn into a hardened lump if exposed to too much moisture.
Customers were buying but too few were re-buying for this reason. Getting it sorted for the next production run was priority number one.

New Packaging Has Landed

The new approach was to use a lightweight refill pouch and/or a reusable metal tin (an optional addition).
Customers could stick to the pouch if they want as it has a resealable zipper to keep the powder protected once opened.
However, the metal tin with a screw-top lid was the best in testing and does a stellar job of keeping that pesky moisture at bay.

Here's how they look (new photos fresh from the studio 🙌 )

Overall I'm happy with how they turned out.
You do a lot of sampling and testing but there's always a bit of an unknown before you go into proper production and get to see the final result in real life.

Optimised For Shipping

I've already learned the lesson that letterbox shipping rules and parcels are annoying. 
So I made it a top requirement for these new pouches to be letterbox-friendly.
Easier said than done and like everything the end result looks obvious but you go through several hurdles to get there. 

In this case, it meant balancing the pouch size with a new fill weight. And then working with the copacker on controlling the amount of air that gets the pouches are packed with to ensure the final result. 
Yes - sweating this level of detail is sadly necessary

I can get two pouches of Mushroom Coffee into one box ...

...and one of all three products in if needed (great for bundling without increasing costs - watch this space :D)

Shipping via letterbox has two main advantages over stupid parcels:

1. Lower cost to ship
2. Much fewer "where's my parcel" complaints and returns to sender if they're not in.

Bonus advantage: unlike parcels, they generally don't get left in recycling bins as a 'safe space' and then...recycled 😒.

Plain Sailing Production...Not Quite

Supply chain and product development may not be rocket science. But my God does it test your patience to the maximum. 
As far as I can gather, the overarching laws of supply chain are basically:

1) Everything will be delayed

2) Tough shit

In theory, it's all pretty simple. But then reality comes a-knockin'. 

So on this production run alone, here's a taster of some of the road bumps that came up:

• An ingredient was just out of stock. 4-week delay.
• Co-packer changed its policy to stop pre-booking. So all ingredients needed to be present before your run can go in the queue. 3-week delay.
• A pallet of Lions Mane mushroom went missing (later found)
• Pouch samples were lost. 1-week delay. 
• etc etc. 

Alone, each of these is a manageable blip.
But together, the ones above alone add up to 8+ weeks of delays.

If your stuff is always in stock, made on time, within budget and to quality standards, then somewhere there's a supply chain manager who's an absolute beast. They're a magician who makes the impossible look easy. Keep hold of them at all costs!