Case Study: Lee Kum Kee - Ken Hom

Brief.

Ken Hom is best known as the man know taught the British how to cook Asian food in the 1980’s. For me, I first saw him on the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen with my dad - also a chef and big-time advocate of Ken Hom bringing the flat-bottomed wok to the UK, opening up Asian cookery for much of the nation.

Celebrating 37-years of his wok, and being one longest best-selling branded cookware - the parent company DKB Brands and client Lee Kum Kee partnered to produce a series of step-by step recipe videos.

Having delivered on another campaign a couple of weeks before, the team at Lee Kum Kee approached me to capture food photography of 6 recipes on the day.

The usage of their food photography was to be split between their digital touchpoints, POS, online recipes, and outputs edited into designed product cards.

Approach.

As Ken Hom likes to create and cook recipes on the fly - it had the potential to make our creative prep more difficult than usual as we didn’t have a hit list of recipe prep scenes and props to assign to each dish.

Bearing this in mind, and with the project running between two brands and a videography team - I pulled in superstar Art Director, Nash who I had worked with on other projects. Working from my small treatment deck, Nash did a prep day in the studio's prop room, and we set aside seven different sets of props that could work well with different types of recipes.

Across our day session, we captured more traditional food photography heroes, and product and recipe pairings that set the product in context to the dish, showing it as a companion to producing the dish.

Having delivered the retouched content, it’s great to see their food photography live and doing well across Lee Kum Kee and DKB Brand channels.