Estimated reading time 10 minutes.

As a venue owner, your goal has to be to attract new couples. Couples in the right quantities, who want to book your wedding venue, at the right price.  However, with more couples ‘armchair’ surfing in search of the perfect wedding venue, along with sharing real weddings and styled shoots, it is necessary to include professional food and drinks images.   Pictures on your phone no longer cut it. 

With more venues on-line, your marketing strategy must encompass other essential aspects of your wedding business. These aspects might include your accommodation, your food and drink.  Sadly, food and beverages, which play a central role in a wedding day, are often overlooked. Often not included within your scheduled social media posts.  However, with more couples ‘shopping’ for wedding venues, investing in quality visual images, is critically important to your ongoing sales strategy.

Takeaway – Images of your venue food need to make couples not only feel hungry but aspire to eat your food.  Stating that your food is ‘restaurant-quality food’ when using amateur images, just isn’t good enough anymore!

How do you create new marketing campaigns, to draw in your intended couples and drive bookings?

Before booking a venue show around, couples are now surfing the net and ‘stalking’ wedding venues.  It is critical, as a wedding venue owner, to let clients see your products and services conveniently in their best ‘light’. You can no longer rely on snaps taken on your phone camera unless it is for an Instagram Story!

What should you do before booking a professional food and drink shoot?

Before embarking on a professional wedding venue food and drink shoot, I recommend you should consider the following:

1. What are you offering?
2. What is your brand?
3. Does your food images match your brand or your aspirations?
4. How do your products and services match-up against your competitors?
5. What do couples want on their big day?   For instance, they may be expecting:

– add on packages such as welcome drinks

– mouth-watering canapes

– unique, seasonal and local catering options – if you offer dry hire

– local bubbles

– delicious wines

– a fantastic wedding breakfast

– different food service

– fun evening food

– money-saving package deals on food and drinks etc

6.  What aspects of your food currently make your couples book your venue?  One way to investigate what makes couples book your wedding venue is to look at the couples’ reviews and feedback. If your budget is tight, consider your signature or best-selling dishes as a priority.

l then look at the best marketing strategies to help differentiate your wedding business and tell your food story.

What should a professional food and drink styled shoot deliver?

With the help of professionals, your food and drink styled shoot should:

• create a meaningful narrative to enable you to use social media more effectively

• provide you with content to drive new traffic. This might include how your chef prepares the dish or perhaps what is their magic ingredient

• stand out with your social media content – your content should be informative and potentially sharable

• make couples want to taste your food

• add value to your products and services, making upselling easier and more effective

• enable you to increase conversions from enquiry to booking

• help with your brand identity

• position yourself as the go-to wedding venue for excellent food and drink, or speciality food for example ‘cooking with fire.’

Takeaway – Styled food images must showcase your best food and drink. They must represent your venue, your products, your services, your brand and your aspirations. Your food photography should also include fresh ingredients and behind-the-scenes photography and videos to build trust and confidence.

What is involved in a professional food and drink styling and photography shoot?

There is a lot that goes into a shoot, before, on the day and after. If you are employing a food stylist, you will need to provide a written or verbal brief. On reciept the stylist will put together a storyboard and solid shot list to capture the mood, vibe and your brand

You will need to agree on which props will work for the shoot. The food stylist can purchase props, (on your behalf) and they are likely bring additional specialist props to help with the food styling

The food stylist will ensure that the food looks exciting and appeals to your target audience.  Working closely with the chef, the food stylist will ensure that the food has texture, layers, high and low points and ‘energy’. The food stylist will add visual clues to help tell the story of the dish and the event. They will have the knowledge, skill and experience to make your food look visually appealing. They will also support the food photographer, helping with lighting and redressing plates etc. to help create your perfect food portfolio.

The food photographer will then work on the images in post-production.

Takeaway –The food photographer will supply images in high and low res, to enable you to use on your website, social media and collateral.

Who else needs to be involved in a food and drink styled shoot?

When planning a food shoot, it is important to have your creative team around you.  Your team might include your chef or chefs – to explain how they envisage the food should look.  The Chefs will need to ensure that the food is plated correctly will select the correct cutlery etc. 

If you plan on including cocktails, unless a member of your bar staff is excellent with cocktails, I recommend a mixologist.

If you want videos, then a videographer would also form part of the crew.

Where should a food and drink shoot take place?

You might choose a photographer that uses a studio, but my professional advice would be to shoot at your wedding venue. By shooting at your venue it will include your tables, chairs, cutlery and crockery etc.

Should you hire a professional food and drink stylist and photographer?

It’s important when photographing food to use a professional food and drink photographer.  Food photography is an art form.  Just because you have worked with a photographer before, it doesn’t mean that they can style food or find solutions to ‘food issues’ etc. 

A combination of a skilled food stylist and a professional photographer will understand how to make your food look good on camera.  For a brilliant shoot, they will make your food look fresh and appealing and they will understand the right lighting and angles etc.  Once the shoot is complete, you will have a beautiful portfolio of curated images.  These images can be used on social media and on your website. The images can also be used in:

• blogs (internal or external)

• magazines

• your printed collateral, (such as your wedding brochure)

• be placed on your venue’s walls in hallways and a room which you use for one-to-ones.

So, go on give your marketing a boost and showcase the best of your venue’s food and drink.

Food Photography is my passion.  As the food stylist, (I’,m not a chef), I work alongside my work wife Fleur Challis of kent Food and Commercial Photography. She is uniquely placed as she has experience of working at weddings and in the food industry. Working together we capture your food and drink at your venue and make it look yummy.

Here is some of our work https://theweddingowl.com/food-styling-food-props-and-food-photography-to-launch-afrobox-uk/

To ensure your wedding venue food and drink photographs help to increase your footfall, contact us to discuss your specifics. Or find out more about our Wedding Venue Food Make-Over Package