Case Study: Lee Kum Kee Summer BBQ

Brief.

Previous client Lee Kum Kee are a well-known brand that is popular with households and chefs alike. Having been operating for over 130-years, they are best known as the original creators of Oyster Sauce. Founded in Hong Kong and operating across Asia, Europe, the UK and the US - they have an ever-growing regional product range.

Just after wrapping a December food photography project, the team contacted me about a January BBQ shoot between myself and food stylist, Jennifer Joyce.

The brief was to develop and shoot Summer BBQ recipes using their Oyster sauce range, Chilli Chow, and other popular favourites - then dress and capture food photography scenes of the products alongside the styled food.

The content usage of the food photography would be used on their digital touch points, POS, online recipes, and outputs edited into designed product cards - across the UK, Germany and the Netherlands.

Approach.

I started off the project with a call with the Lee Kum Kee brand team, and the food stylist - to learn about their brief. The client led with some ideas for the types of recipes they wanted as part of their Summer BBQ campaign.

Having worked with the client on many projects, I developed this into a food photography brief treatment, and planned out our shooting time for the 3 x day shoot.

The treatment included our tried and tested lifestyle food photography format of shooting 3 core shots per recipe; a food photography hero, and recipe and product pairing - with either an individual or collection of products for each dish and region, and graphic imagery of the food itself..

Jennifer developed the recipes over a few days and hand-picked props from her collection of 30-years of food styling for cookbooks and from her personal collection. These were tied together with my collection of handmade and vinyl food photography backgrounds. Across a 3-day food photography shoot, we worked together to dress and style the client’s products into food photography scenes.

I used a comprehensive lighting setup to create light that felt natural and soft, yet dappled with contrast. This gave us a summer sun effect to the imagery whilst remaining on-brand for the client.

After sharing a contact sheet for the selects, their retouched food photography was completed, and it was great to see the imagery live across all of their touch points.