Brief.

Existing client, ManiLife are a well-known B Corp brand that produces amazing peanut butter using single-estate peanuts from a family farm in Argentina. Collaborative at-heart and looking to expand their offering, they teamed up with the equally well known popcorn brand, Joe & Seph’s.

The brand collaboration saw two new products shortly being released; a Salted Caramel peanut butter using Joe & Seph’s Salted Caramel Sauce, and Joe & Seph’s Popcorn, using ManiLife’s Deep Roast peanut butter.

To learn more about these products and to get a feel of any creative steer the client may have had, I shared a brand discovery form with them to fill out. Once complete, we jumped on a quick call to talk through the creative and to sign off on the shoot length; landing on a day session.

As it was a brand collaboration, there would be two separate sets of brand guidelines, so I had to take special care that the food photography was on-brand for both of them.

Approach.

I fleshed-out my call notes into a creative brief treatment; this involved an art direction prep day, a one day shoot, light food styling, and their retouching.

I created a lifestyle food photography shot list. These were split into 2 lifestyle food photography scenes, using 3 core shot formats. These ranged from traditional food photography, product and recipe pairings, and a kitchen packshot - showing one of the products paired with a small selection of ingredients from the hero dish.

The last scene was packshot product photography that showed the product paired with the core ingredient cues and a couple of product flat lays -with the product laying on a bed of the core Joe & Seph’s popcorn.

Within each of the lifestyle scenes and working on the visual toolkit that I’ve built with the brand - I produced 2 x bespoke sets that use a neutral tabletop and bespoke backgrounds. These are made to match the key colours of each product - for easy audience recognition.

As we only needed simple food styling, I made a popcorn caramel cheesecake from my repertoire of pre-developed recipes that I use on my small supper clubs and when simple recipes are needed for shoots.

Using this, I was able to produce and capture a collection of salient, on-brand food photography for ManiLife + Joe & Seph’s. The clients were all very happy and it’s great to see their audience’s loving the new collaboration.