Food Styling For Clients

I started food styling for various clients as an in house photographer for 21SIX nearly two years ago. In that time I have worked with clients, Roquito Peppers, Merchant Gourment, Baxter’s Beetroot Juice and Street Eats. This entails manging and disscussing monthly content for the clients socail media platforms, sourcing recipes to cook and style each image.

Merchant Gourmet:

Merchant Gourmet has by far been my favourite account to work with, primarly beacuse they have alot of products to show case. Therefore I had a diverse range of foods, themes and target audiences. The company launced in 1994 and since have been supplying exciting ingredients such as Dulce De Leche, Quinoa and Puy Lentils to the masses.

Each month I would disscuss with the copy content manager about various ideas, up coming events or National Days to incorporate and drum up excitement with themed food. A lot of time would be spent reaserching and sourcing recipes to fit a particular grain that would match up the content, such as ‘Freekeh Fridays’ or ‘Meat Free Mondays’. The process was exillerating and stressful as most of the time I would be learning on the job and as I went along. At first I wasn’t very confident, and looking back at the earlier imagry the difference is quite dramatic. However I rapidly began to understand the relationship between the food and everything else surrounding it.

I managed to handle three accounts, producing monthly imagery whilst keeping up with my university degree. Needless to say the experiance has been worth everything. It helped a great deal that I have always been well educated about food. Being brought up in a household that made me appreciate ‘good’ food which has been sourced responsibly aided in the process emensily. With no formal teaching I learnt about the way different foods reacted to different lighting as well as what colour foods complimented others. Not only this but the technical side of making a document ready for facebook compared to that of twitter, I also learnt how to use the site ‘Hootsuite’ in order to auto schedule content. Moreover it disaplined me with time management, it was down to me to source recipes, by the produce, cook, style and photograph up to 30 images a month for just one client, whilst being at univeristy and managing the other clients.

Roquito Peppers:

Whilst Roquito was with 21SIX I managed thier photography between the months of July, 2014 — October, 2014 My work for them inculded traveling to food festivsls to document their stall and the event for thier scoial media accounts. The most noteworthy being when I went with Roquito Peppers to Meatopia food festival in 2014 as their official photographer, documenting the weekend and thier brand.

Aside from food festivals I would also deliver monthly images for their Facebook and Twitter accounts. I quickly realised how the smaller the product range, the mjore difficult it is to create content around. It would take a lot of extra expenses as the product would rarely be photographed on its own.

Baxters Beetroot Juice:

Baxter’s Beetroot Juice was the biggest challenge creatively as I quickly realised a) I really didn’t like the smell or taste of a beetroot and b) there are only so many things that make a beetroot look appealing. Whilst dealing with quite a niche product it truly taught me to think out side the box when it comes to what you can use as enaging and varied content.