Building a year-long content library for Sweet Baby Rays

The brief

EuroFoodBrands came to us wanting to create a rich asset library that they could use to service every UK Sweet Baby Rays’ channel they were running, alongside enriching their e-commerce listings with retailers and Amazon.

Noticing the rising tide of video, it was crucial that we were able to produce both photography and video assets to help with product engagement.

The challenges

The parent brand had never invested in high-end photography for the UK market and this project was to act as a test-bed for doing so, making it a strategically important project both for the brand, and EuroFoodBrands.

The existing content used across their social channels typically came from UGC content and BBQ competitions, which weren’t aligning with where the brand’s ambitions were to move to.

The content library we captured also needed to service their content needs across a full year, meaning not only did we need a high volume of assets, but they needed to be multi-seasonal too, adding complications to the production.

As well as the multi-seasonal content, we needed to capture imagery that benefitted their key distributors, meaning that we needed to create imagery that could be used specifically for Morrisons etc. that included nods to their stores.

Our approach

We worked with the EuroFoodBrands team to conduct some top-level creative research:

• What were their competitors doing (and not doing)
• Where did they envisage the brand’s target audience being in a year
• What were the key seasons and/or occasions they wanted to create content for

We realised during this process that a lot of the previous imagery felt quite gluttonous, as did the content that other brands were creating, prompting us to move in a more refined direction to appeal to a broader audience and convey a classier image suited for a UK audience. From there we could map out the visual creative to drive key messages around the brand: authentic American routes, product versatility and living up to the sauce being “The Boss”.

Our Senior Creative, Silas Collins’ approach consisted of three studio set ups: Product, Indoor and Outdoor; considering lighting and shadows with bright, brand colours carried throughout, and the respective prop style boards.

We split the shoot into two phases. The initial phase was to capture product photography and a series of key recipes to act as a style setter for the second phase. These included all variations, with and without product, and a number of angles. With the core visual identity locked in, the second phase shifted focus to video. We explored a variety of settings and use cases, from lifestyle-driven scenes to more functional, product-led moments, to reflect how the product fits into everyday routines. This phase was all about movement, mood, and storytelling, building on the established visual language while expanding into richer, more dynamic content.

We wrapped the project with a handful of additional occasional/seasonal stills (think Halloween, for example). For these, we needed to craft imagery that would be suitable across multiple settings and times of day. As such, this is where we brought virtual production into the fold, allowing us to curate complex imagery with entirely customisable backdrops to fit within client budget.