Food photography for an artisan organic cookie brand in Croydon
Every flavour, styled with what is actually in it.
Hyde's Real Sweet Artisanal Cookies, Croydon.
The business
Hyde's Real Sweet make artisanal cookies with organic ingredients and Swiss chocolate, with branding that borrows from a Parisian patisserie rather than a bakery counter. Charesa came to me directly. She knew exactly what the brand was supposed to feel like, which makes my job much easier and much more fun.
What they needed
Charesa launched on AI images, and they were not bad ones. For a brand getting itself out of the door with no product photography and no budget for any, that is a reasonable way to start, and plenty of good businesses have started exactly there.
What it costs you is credibility, and she felt that come back at her. An artisan cookie is sold on craft, and a picture that nobody baked is arguing against you while it works for you. So the brief was the real thing: the actual ingredients, the actual crumb, the actual cookie. She replaced the launch set as soon as there was a shoot to replace it with.
Beyond that, a cohesive set. Not a folder of cookie pictures, but one look that held together across the delivery listing, the packaging and the social feed, so that a customer seeing one of them recognised the next. Flavour and colour had to carry it, because that is what a cookie sells on.
Her brief, in her terms: show the ingredients and show the care. Make them look irresistible and make them look real. And let the ingredients support the cookie in the frame without disturbing it.
What I did
I wrote a styling guide before the shoot. Every flavour got a plan for how its own ingredients would be prepared and placed, because the difference between a prop and a story is preparation.
The ingredients are not raw. They are cut down, and some of them are toasted, so a pistachio in the frame looks like the pistachio that went into the cookie rather than one out of a bag. They sit around the cookie supporting it and never disturbing it, which was Charesa's own brief and the hardest part of the job to get right.
Three shapes, and each one answers a different question
One picture per flavour, on a 100mm macro
Everything sharp. The pistachio sits with pistachios. The citrus sits with the citrus. Nothing is borrowed from another shot.
The broken cookie, stacked
One cookie propped on a second so it stands more upright, broken open at the top. You see what a whole one looks like and what is inside it in the same frame. A whole cookie on its own photographs as a brown disc, and texture is the thing a customer is buying.
A designed overhead of the entire range
Every flavour with its own ingredients around it. One frame that shows the whole offering, which is the picture a new customer needs and the one a menu of singles can never give them.
What a range shoot looks like from the inside
What it gave her
Every live page on her site now runs the real pictures. The set covers the range flavour by flavour rather than as a handful of heroes, and it came with unlimited usage rights, so it goes wherever the brand goes without coming back to me for permission.
In her words
“I booked Andras to photograph my product range for Hyde's Real Sweet Artisanal Cookies and I couldn't be happier with the results. From the moment we started, he was warm, professional and really listened to what I wanted — he didn't just understand the brief, he elevated it. The photos are beautiful. Genuinely beyond what I expected. Andras has a natural ability to capture not just a product but the feeling behind it, and that's rare. Every shot reflects the quality and care that goes into Hyde's Real Sweet and I know these images are going to represent the brand for a long time to come. If you're looking for a photographer who will make you feel safe, heard and genuinely excited about your brand — Andras is your person. I will absolutely be working with him again.”
Charesa Gayle, Hyde's Real Sweet Artisanal Cookies, Croydon. Five stars on Google.
Questions I get asked about this kind of shoot
How long does a full range take?
Plan a day when there is styling in it. Hyde's came in on a half day because two of her team worked alongside me and the work got efficient fast, but a day is the honest scope for a range shot flavour by flavour.
Do you shoot the packaging as well as the product?
Yes, I do packaging shots as well. On a range like this the packaging shot is the product on the packaging, so it is the same job.
Do I need to supply a stylist?
No. You can ask me to do the styling, and on a range like Hyde's that is what happened. Be aware it makes the shoot longer, because it is a separate piece of work rather than something that happens while the shutter goes.
Got a range to photograph, or one to replace? Send me the product list and I will tell you what I would do with it.
Food photography, Croydon and London. Product photography, packaging photography, packaging shot, product shot, food styling, social content, campaign photo shoot, product launch photography, artisan bakery photography, cookie photography, London food photographer.
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