PROPER. Small word, big ambition.
PROPER’s brand origin story starts in 2011 with its founder, Cassandra Stavrou, working in an ad agency and noticing there weren’t any decent healthy snacks available to get the office over the dreaded 3pm slump. The healthy snacking landscape at that time wasn’t a positive space; it was lacking in vibes; everything was white and pale blue, and the language was all around diet. She wanted to create healthier snacks, that taste banging with no compromise.
We made the first batches of PROPERCORN in a refashioned cement mixer, helping land our first customer, Google HQ then quickly becoming the official snack of London Fashion Week. By 2019, we became known as PROPER snacks, no longer just a popcorn company, launching PROPERCHIPS, our award-winning range of lentil chips. Snacks, done properly still rings true for everything we do. All our snacks are better for you, vegan, gluten free and use natural seasoning.
We’ve always looked outside of our category to the behaviours of fashion and lifestyle brands and reflected that in our approach. From wrapping the first London bus in 2015 to building the UKs first giant claw machine, we have always been a brand of firsts, turning up in a bold, positive, playful and unexpected way to punch above our weight.
In 2023, our key focus has been to drive awareness & buzz, and partnerships have been a key lever for us to scale our awareness, tap into culturally relevant moments and bring more hype and buzz back into the popcorn category.
First came our collab with Barbie The Movie, where we launched a Barbie Sweet popcorn, which led to our highest rate of sale ever. We wrapped London buses in our iconic pink popcorn print and opened an unmissable, immersive pop up; the Barbie x PROPER CORN-ER Shop, over movie release weekend. It generated an insane amount of earned social and buzz.
Next, we aimed to generate conversation through our limited-edition ‘Popcorn Chicken Popcorn’ collab with KFC. For its release, we launched our giant human claw machine where people were dunked into 17,000 packs of popcorn and had the chance to win hidden golden kernel or colonel vouchers. To mark the collab, we even put a ring on it. With a long history of championing independent creators, we commissioned Anna Lomax to design the exclusive popcorn chicken popcorn rings, inspired by the iconic popcorn cinema buckets & KFC bucket asset, landed coverage in key hype PR titles.
This has all ultimately helped turn the popcorn category from -2% decline to +10% growth, with PROPERCORN growing by 17% and £4.8M value the last 52WKS. Total PROPER value has grown +19% year on year with PROPER snacks now worth £55.2M RSV.