What’s the deal with Pouches?

A few of you have asked for more information about our packaging, environmental thoughts and why we chose our pouch, here’s a little blog to explain!

When we first started to design our soup packaging we, of course, looked into the well known and expected canned options as well as tetra pack options.  We quickly learned that these two options were not as environmentally friendly as a new pouch format, and hence we decided to mix things up a bit and go all in on pouches.  Let us explain the nitty gritty details... 

• Efficient Shipping - Pouches are incredibly lightweight, flexible and almost have 100x more shipping efficiency than a can. For example you have to ship truck loads of empty cans to the production facility, and due to their circular shape you always lose shipping efficiencies in the gap between all the cans. Pouches are the opposite to all this being super light and efficient with space. 

• Less Waste Pound for Pound - We get a lot of comments asking ‘why plastic’, but remember tetra packs also contain plastic, as they are made up of multiple layers of both plastic and metal, and many cans also have a plastic liner, so although they look like they are plastic free they are almost certainly not.  The plastic in our pouch is on full display, and you can see exactly how much plastic there is, pound for pound the weight of waste of a can or tetra pak is much more than a pouch.

• Pouch Performance - In terms of performance, pouches offer the same shelf-stable options as tetra paks and cans, and actually are even better than cans as we do not need to add any artificial preservatives to keep things fresh and tasting great - the pouch technology does it all.

• Pouch Recycling - The pouches are fully recyclable at TerraCycle facilities, and in all Proper Good shipments we include a flyer with info of how to get a recycling envelope. We fully pay for you to ship the pouches back to us if you don’t live near a TerraCycle facility so we can recycle them, at no cost to you.  Even with this additional shipping of the pouches back to us, since they are so lightweight, we are still better for carbon footprint than shipping cans everywhere AND they are fully and properly recycled, now we think that is Proper Good.  In addition, a lot of people think that you can easily recycle tetra paks at home but actually you cannot, as they also require special recycling… unfortunately, putting Tetra paks in your recycling at home will just end up in landfills. 

• User friendly - The pouches are also BPA free, they keep things fresh and are more user friendly as you can heat your meal in the pouch in a microwave, you cannot do that with tetra pak or cans due to the metal in the packaging. 

• Secondary Packaging - Outside of the pouches we ensure that all of our secondary packaging is easily 100% recyclable at home. We have tried to minimize our environmental impact at every step of the process.  

• No Refrigeration Needed - There are many brands shipping frozen home meals that need refrigeration with dry ice and enormous amounts of insulated packaging and plastic. Our pouches allow the soups to be shipped ambient so we do not need all of this additional packaging, those of you who have tried Proper Good know, we ship our meals in a tiny box, with no added packaging, so it’s incredibly small and the best we can possibly do on the environmental impact. 

In additional to all of this we are also working with Climate Neutral to offset our environmental impact.

So there you have it, it’s certainly not perfect and we have some other bits in the works to make it even better, but right now we are doing everything we can to make it as environmentally friendly as possible. Every business has some environmental impact, but we, of course, aim to do what we can and continually reevaluate how to minimize our impact, while making wholesome meals for you to enjoy :-)

Thanks for reading!

Chris & Jen-

Links

Pouch vs Can Article - https://www.rovema-na.com/blog/5-important-reasons-to-switch-from-stand-up-pouches-or-pillow-bags