Mentally flash back a decade or so, to all the food-based skincare brands vying for Next Big Thing status. Low on “bad for you” preservatives and high on “good for you” fruit- and vegetable-derived ingredients, they appealed to anyone and everyone looking for a natural work-around for lines and wrinkles. 

But when a good chunk of these so-called “farm to medicine cabinet” brands didn’t live up to the hype, we all went scampering back to the chemicals. Save the organic goji berries for a breakfast smoothie, it’s time to get real. (Or get retinol …) 

Enter HPPY Skin, a new “fridge to face” brand that draws on proprietary HPP (High Pressure Processing) technology from the food industry to ensure ingredients extracted from grapes, bananas, and Manuka honey and the like actually deliver on the promise of better skin. 

The brand, which soft-launched a year ago and is currently selling a tightly edited range of masks direct to consumer on its own website, is the brainchild of Hannah Penn, whose family owns Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin-based Good Foods. Purveyor of a line of popular chip dips, Good Foods has long relied on HPP to keep its products ultra-fresh. 

“I was first introduced to the power of high pressure technology 15 years ago in my family’s guacamole factory,” Penn recalls. “The more I learned about it, the more I wondered what else it could do.”

A self-described “avid skincare lover,” Penn says she was curious why the beauty industry didn’t avail itself of the technological advances deployed to keep food ingredients fresh, “particularly around nutrient retention and molecular structure.”

In 2019, Penn first broached the topic of potentially incorporating HPP into skincare with her father, Kurt Penn, founder and CEO of Good Foods. “I knew this technology had a place in skincare, given how passionate people are about what they put on their skin,” she says. “I just needed to figure out how to merge the two.” 

Penn’s figuring-it-out process proved arduous. Then based in New York City, where she held a full-time job in event marketing, Penn connected with Joyce Longfield, microbiologist and HPP Process Authority Expert for Good Foods. 

Once Covid hit in 2020, and her event marketing job was put on hiatus, Penn relocated to Chicago, roughly an hour from the Good Foods headquarters. Then she dove in, creating face mask samples with Longfield.  

“Very quickly we discovered why this had never been done before,” says Penn. “Obtaining the right color, texture, smell, and consistency proved to be an enormous challenge.”

After two years and what Penn describes as countless iterations, Penn and Longfield tapped a CEO for the nascent skincare brand, Ilana Fischer, who in turn introduced them to cosmetic chemist Lalita Iyer. 

Iyer, whose @skinchemy Instagram has 155,000 followers, helped “supercharge” the samples Penn and Longfield had cooked up in the lab. And in September 2023, HPPY Skin launched its first product, a mask dubbed Refresh. 

“It took four years of incredibly hard work, but we ended up with something truly innovative and disruptive to the category and secured a patent to prove it,” says Penn. 

Although Penn and her team initially thought they’d be able to tap the existing HPP machinery at Good Foods, that proved impossible. 

“Every part of the manufacturing process had to be customized and built from the ground up,” she says. “From our mixing equipment to our filling machines, we had to create special tooling that would work with our smoothie-like formulations and small, single-use packs. We also had to create special containers to hold our product inside the HPP machine, given their small size, and create special packaging that wouldn't explode or delaminate under the intense pressure of HPP.”

Looking back on that four-year stretch, Penn says it was grueling. “I can’t think of anything that wasn't a hurdle,” she recalls, rattling off other roadblocks beyond all the formulation iterations and costly development of custom machinery. 

“Marketing was a huge challenge to figure out how to communicate our points of differentiation,” she notes. “So much so, we went through two major re-brands, all before we even launched.”

But the biggest hurdle of all? Packaging. “Our goal was to launch in February of 2023, but we were unable to do so as our packaging kept delaminating—basically peeling apart—from the intense water pressure of HPP,” says Penn. “We tried every type of film available until we discovered a technology that essentially etches our artwork directly onto our pods.”

With all that behind her, Penn is thrilled to be launching three new single-use masks, which are manufactured onsite at Good Foods’ USDA and FDA certified facility: Rewind Mask, a radiance replenisher featuring red grapes, lactic acid, and rosehip oil; Calm Mask, a redness-reducing skin soother crafted from the Centella flower, banana, and ceramides; and Clarity Mask, a formulation designed to both brighten pigmentation and tighten pores that’s fueled by clay, Manuka honey, salicylic acid, and niacinamide. 

Individually, the masks are priced at $16 but are also available in packs of five $56 and 20 for $200. 

Why launch with masks? Penn believes they’re a fairly easy way into an existing skincare routine. 

“Masks felt like the most approachable way to introduce a novel concept to the consumer,” she says. “I love following the latest trends in skincare, but my personal skincare routine is pretty much set in stone. I've found what works for me and don't want to deviate from my tried-and-true products. I will however, test out different face masks as they tend to be single-use and don't impact my daily routine. Since face masks are low commitment, they felt like the lowest barrier to entry and best way to get consumers to try a new brand.” 

Still, there were other key reasons Penn opted for masks at launch, including the “formulation opportunity” they provided. Because masks aren’t a leave-on product, they allowed Penn and her team to incorporate whole ingredients that would typically leave a residue if not rinsed off. Additionally, the single-use products maintain optimal freshness and shelf life because they aren’t exposed to air until they’re opened.

Despite the starring role food ingredients play in HPPY Skin’s masks, Penn says she considers them more technology-based than food-derived.

“So many of the clinical skincare ingredients we know to be powerhouses, such as niacinamide, are just the clinical name of things naturally occurring in nature, such as Vitamin B3,” she notes. “Kale for example, is a great source of Vitamin B3 as well as other beneficial nutrients for skin. Until HPP, companies have been limited to heat or chemical extraction methods which can only obtain a single nutrient at a time and damage it in the process, resulting in decreased potency. By using HPP we're able to extract not just niacinamide but the full range of phytonutrients housed in each whole food ingredient and not only preserve them without any damage but allow them to continue to thrive and become even more bioavailable, making our formulations highly potent and efficacious.”

In other words, with HPP, we’re on to next-gen, food-based skincare. 

“I don't think food-based skincare has actually had its moment because food wasn't truly being utilized,” Penn says. “It was really there in name only.”