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 and a half of work together.
The brief
A Jamaican patty is one of the hardest things in food to photograph. It is a sealed golden parcel, and from the outside every one looks identical. Beef, curried chicken, saltfish, vegetable: same shape, same colour, same crimp.
Port Royal were supplying the supermarkets, moving into catering, and building a new site. They needed one library that could talk to a Tesco buyer and to somebody scrolling at half past nine at night. Two very different audiences, and a product that gives the camera almost nothing to work with.
"It's very hard to make food look good, especially a simple product like a Jamaican patty."
Edward Johnston, Managing Director
The work
My take
I built the whole creative around the pastry, because that is what a patty actually is. It is unusually flaky, it shatters into long flakes, and that texture is the eating experience. So every hero is broken open, and the light is set to make the layers separate.
Nobody scrolls past food they can already taste.
I did the food styling myself, working alongside their chef, and I set up in one of their bigger offices so the product came off the line and onto the set while it was still right. A patty photographed forty minutes out of the oven is a different object to one photographed at four.
The part that mattered most was not technical. It was understanding what a patty is culturally, what those flavours mean, and where the strength of the brand actually sits. Then building every frame to say it.
Approach
Two audiences served from one production run. Their trade side can show Tesco the factory and the equipment. Their consumer side has months of social material. The same assets carry the new site.
The bit I am proudest of is not a picture. It is that they stopped thinking of me as a photographer they book and started thinking of me as part of how the business goes to market. That is the job I actually want with a food brand: in the room, understanding what you are trying to sell and to whom, and building the pictures backwards from it.
The picture stopped being mine the day it went to print. It is on the pack now, on a shelf, doing a job every time somebody walks past the chiller and decides in about a second and a half whether they are having a pie tonight. That is what the work is for.
"It's like a mini art department and video department within the company."
Edward Johnston, Managing Director
"You have brought our patties to life, our pies to life. We can actually even taste the jerk chicken when you look at one of Andras's photos."
Aaron, Port Royal Patties
"We see Andras now as an extension of our team, and a very valuable player on that team."
Aaron, Port Royal Patties
Deliverables
- Hero product photography, every flavour in the range, cut open so the filling and the layers both read
- Lifestyle sets with what a patty is genuinely eaten with: banana chips, pepper sauce, a cold Ting
- B2B factory film for the conversations with retail buyers
- Founder interviews and ad-style hook cuts for paid
- A social and supermarket library built to run for the next three to six months, most of it repurposable across formats rather than shot once and spent
Everything came from the same days on site. One brief, one set-up, one person.
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