Photography and film for food manufacturers
Your product as the hero, in content people actually want to watch and share.
You make the product. You probably do not have a creative department, and you certainly do not have a production department. So the content gets handed to whoever is free, or to a creator, and it comes back mixed. Some of it is good. Some of it does not look like your product at all.
Let me do the cooking and the filming
I cook it and I shoot it, on the same day, in the same head. You get crisp content that fits every channel you actually sell through: the pack, the listing, the trade deck, the retailer’s site, the ads and the socials. One brief, one supplier, no coordination between three people who have never met.
The entertaining recipe
This is the thing I would sell you first, and it has a name because it works.
A recipe that entertains puts your product in the middle of something somebody actually wants to watch. Not a pack shot they scroll past. Not a demo nobody finishes. A dish being made, with your product doing the work, and a reason to keep watching until the end.
It is still brand content. It has your look, your positioning and your product doing its job. It just has to stay interesting, because interesting is what gets watched, saved and sent on.
Your product as the hero
Hero means the dish exists because of your product. That is a deliberate choice and it changes everything about how the thing is shot: what is in focus, what the hands do, which second the camera stays on. I have cooked in professional kitchens for ten years, so I know which second that is.
What the work has looked like
Port Royal Patties, a Jamaican patty and pie manufacturer in Park Royal supplying Asda, Morrisons and Tesco. Factory shoots and factory film, and one of my photographs is printed on the retail box on the shelf. The owner called it a mini art department and video department inside the company.
Ming Foods, traditional bao styled with a modern twist: five product shots, all different, plus eight short videos. And the full wholesale listing package: the pack, the height, the inside of the product, then matching lifestyle shot in the factory while everything cooks.
Haloodies, a halal meat factory that supplied the supermarkets. Packaging and styling shots, and product content built for the listing rather than for a portfolio.
Global Knives, the Elements range launch: forty styled pictures, four set films, four ad cuts and three reels. Their site still runs those photographs today.
What somebody who buys this for a living says
Gabrielle Lily Darne, who commissions this work for her own food manufacturing clients, left this publicly, her words verbatim:
“I have worked with Smart Food Media multiple times in recent years. It is always a pleasure doing so. Andras’s cooking and photography knowledge is immense and he always hits it out of the park for my food manufacturing clients. I highly recommend using them for any food or cooking-related brands. Product photography, Social Video Reels, Lifestyle photography, and Product use demonstration content. Wholesale listing content.”
Three places it can happen
On site in your factory. In the studio. Or in a kitchen studio. Sometimes all three on the same project. It depends what the work is aiming for, and the mobile studio is what makes that a choice rather than a compromise. The product goes from the line onto the set while it still looks like it did when it was made, or it comes to me and gets built here.
Three sizes, the same work
The whole thing is a Creative Bank: the structured set of assets your team pulls from, built once and kept filled. Or take a piece of it. Recipe content built around your product, or a single Content Day. Same work, different size.
Where to next
Want the recipe developed properly as well as filmed? Recipe development. Just want to see the food? Taste it.
Take two minutes and get in touch.
Related work.
See the case studies
A year and a half of their content.
Purezza, plant-based Italian and the UK's first vegan pizzeria. Camden, Brighton and Manchester. Monthly content across three restaurants: Instagram, the delivery platforms, the newsletter, and their brand-to-brand collaborations. Built for their audience: Gen Z, three quarters women.
A mini art department, inside a Park Royal patty factory.
Port Royal Patties, Jamaican patty and pie manufacturer in Park Royal. Supplies Asda, Morrisons and Tesco. Over a year of work together, across multiple shoots.
One look, everywhere they are found.
Red Dog Saloon, Shoreditch-based Texas-style barbecue group, multiple sites, multiple cities. Over a year, half a dozen shoots. Big bite, big flavour, the food as it actually is.