Case Study: ManiLife - Amazon Recipe Pairing & Packshots

Brief.

ManiLife are a popular and well-loved brand who produce peanut butter using single-estate peanuts from a family farm in Argentina. They have also been awarded B Corporation status for reaching and maintaining high standards of transparency within their business.

Wanting to boost their visual presence on their Amazon A+ Listing and in-turn raise sales across each product listing - the marketing team reached out to me about producing and shooting food photography of their core product range.

With the range comprising of 4-core ranges and 1-2 products within each range (usually a smooth and a crunchy), the product also comes in two form factors; a jar and a larger tub. This meant there was a large array of considerations to be made to our approach; both in capturing everything, but also not wanting to spread ourselves too thinly.

I started off by having the returning client to fill in a creative discovery form - with a wide request of information to help me better understand their unique needs and their brand isngihts that I could apply to my creative.

Once done, we hopped on a call to run through this and my initial ideas on the creative as well as how long it would take to produce.

Approach.

Following the call and sign-off, I formed it into a creative brief treatment for our food photography session; this included a day of art direction prep, a two-day session, a food stylist for one of the days (including a prep day for them), and a day of retouching.

The photography shot list I produced was split into two separate days; the first was focused on producing packshot product photography, showing wide product range paired with core ingredient cues. These would be captured as singles of each form factor, and as sub-range pairings.

The second part of our day would be to capture food photography lifestyle scenes. This would be started off by Evie the food stylist who was to pair one recipe to each of the 4-core range products. This was to be developed ahead of the shoot to give me steer on the props needed from the food photography prop house.

We would be capturing these dishes across 4 lifestyle photography scenes, and across 4 shot formats. First would be a traditional food photography hero of a simple styled dish that can have the product used as a garnish, then a product and recipe pairing showing the product as a companion, then a graphic close-up of the dish, and kitchen packshots; these would be set contemporary tabletop kitchen scene showing the product paired with a small selection of ingredients from the hero dish.

As part of the brand photography toolkit that we’ve developed is placing the products and pairings within bespoke scenes that make use of clean tabletops and backgrounds that are produced to match the key colours of each product - for easy audience recognition.

Through an art direction prep day, and two shoot days, we produced and captured a salient collection of brand photography for ManiLife in a couple of different ratios per item; giving a wide collection of outputs for the brand to use.