Fresh food – Stock photography for Co.opmart

Overview

Co.opmart, one of the largest retailers in Viet Nam, which run Co.opmart supermarket franchise, need to refresh their stock archive of fresh food. They use it so often in their monthly shopping guide.

Calme studio – a commercial photography studio, and with experience in stock photography, was lucky to be rewarded this project.

Art direction

The old archive has been done long time ago, with old and outdated style. Coop Mart are in need of a new, refresh, contemporary look, and appeal to the mass.

Photos from this photoshoot will be used as a long-term marketing asset, mostly used in monthly shopping guide and other design purpose. We need to make sure styling and photography wont be outdated in few years.

We decided this photoshoot will be styling-heavy, which is a heavy workload for our stylist. Our approach is a contemporary style, with clear visual.

Challenge

This is a big photoshoot, with hundreds of SKU we need to photograph. Most of them is fresh food and green vegetables, something we can not keep it overnight. Coop Mart had supplied new SKU everyday for our work.

Unlucky for us, this photoshoot was approved right before Covid lockdown in Ho Chi Minh. We had to obey the gathering rule, which means no more than 5 people at a time.

So, our team consisted of 4 people, 1 from client, 1 stylist, and 1 assistants, working together for 9 days continuously to complete list of photograph client wants.

Photoshoot

Our main goal is showing food as fresh as possible, which means showing shine in their skins, and juicy cut.

Our stylist is the true hero, when she has to extensively prepare and styling different type of food. From green vegetables to fruit, from fresh food to cooked food, she does brilliant job. Styling is what make all the food shine.

Our photographer creates a set with 3 light setup, but not normal 3-points setup. All lights is equiped with softbox for control light spill. Outer diffusion layer is removed to give back details from hard light. Hard but not too hard.

Lighting system has to be well controlled. We need color to be consistent. Some lighting system changes color after long time shooting, so we decided to choose good lighting sysem to avoid that phenomenom. Otherwise, retouching would take forever to fix problem we could avoid in beginning.

Every day we process to shoot 40 – 50 SKUs. In 10 hours time frame, it means styling team has to work very quick and efficient. They are truly our hero in this photoshoot.

As you can see, we shoot vastly different type of food, with different form and quality.

Result

We delivered more than 800 final images, help our client develop their images bank for future use. Many has been used in their shoping guide since.