Making food look as good as it tastes is harder than you’d think. With its trade show debut imminent, Wald Family Foods presented 877 with an exciting food photography and videography challenge. We captured each of Wald
Wald Family Foods is actually the product of two food manufacturers (Taste Traditions of Omaha and DI Manufacturing) combining forces, meaning all pre-existing food photography had to be reshot to reflect a uniform brand vision.
The variety of products Wald Family Foods makes is staggering. They’re the number one gluten-free pizza manufacturer in the country. They offer a seemingly endless array of soups, pastas and breads. Wald Family Foods supplies product to food service operations, schools, healthcare facilities, retailers and more.
We set to work cataloguing and ordering – then receiving and inventory-ing – each and every one of Wald Family Foods’ food products. We received a near-half-ton of food which we stored in increasingly tight-spaced fridges and freezers.
We rigged a staging area for each product to be simultaneously photographed from a few different angles. A Nikon D800 screwed onto a crossbar allowed overhead shots, and a D7000 set on a tripod grabbed downward single-angle shots with a shallower depth of field. We took a second D7000 in hand to nab any other shots we wanted. We shot spiraling and panning shots with a Fujifilm XT3.
The process of readying the soups for camera-time was an interesting challenge. There’s nothing like being paid to strain beans from a soup broth, wash them off and pick the prettiest among them to strategically place atop said soup.
We prepared each item – including offerings like cheesy beef enchiladas, hot dog buns, gluten-free pizza crust, breaded chicken nuggets and more – so they’d look their absolute best for food photography while also accurately representing the products.
Post-production included running the raw photos through Lightroom and color correcting video in After Effects.
The content we captured over the weeks-long shoot are used in a newly-designed product brochure and three videos for the International Dairy Deli Bakery Association 2019 trade show, one of which you may preview below.