Case Study: Lee Kum Kee - Content Archive

Brief.

Lee Kum Kee are a long-term client of mine, having worked on lots of food photography shoots and video productions with agencies over the years. The brand is a popular household name, best known for being the creator of Oyster Sauce, and their wide range of sauces; from soy to XO Sauce, glazes and more.

Their brand team reached out to me as they wanted a complete refresh of their in-house content library - ranging from food photography to recipe and product recipe pairings.

They needed a minimum of 42 individually developed, styled, and dressed dishes - with roughly 50 products for their 3 main European regions: UK x 2 campaigns, Germany and the Netherlands. The calculated shooting time was to be 5 full days of shooting, plus development dates for the art department - for a food stylist and art director.

The usage of their content would be split between their POS, online recipes, pamphlets and outputs edited into designed product cards.

Approach.

Following a production call with the client and crew - we signed off the general direction. I then produced a food photography briefing treatment deck, to tie together the client art direction guidelines and the call sheet.

Building on the workflow that I had produced with this client, we put together a call sheet based on our lifestyle food photography format of shooting 2 core shot formats. This included a traditional food photography hero, along with a recipe and product pairing - to include either an individual or collection of products for each dish and region.

The scenes would be shot as portraits and landscapes - to give a wide range of uses for the brand.

Food stylist Jennifer Joyce had three days of recipe development on the lead-up to the shoot, working with the internal brand chef. Each recipe was to include one or more Lee Kum Kee product, with the food stylist testing the more complex recipes and providing visual styling examples of each for a better workflow on our shoot days.

Whilst the dishes were signed off, the art director did a couple of prop house runs at the local food photography prop house - selecting a wide collection of on-brand and complimentary props and backgrounds to go with each recipe.

Over five days at a location house in Richmond, London - we shot between 7 to 9 recipes per day - I worked with the food stylist and the Art Director to bring the scenes together; after the shoot, the client was provided a contact sheet, where they selected their images to be retouched.

The clients were really pleased with their new food photography content archive and it is great to already see them in use.