Why specialists give food brands the recipe for distinction

My daughter recently renovated her bathroom in Spain. She hired a contractor who claimed he could do it all: tiling, plumbing, electricity, planning, purchasing. A one-man solution. That promise alone should have raised suspicion. You can guess where this is going: a total shit show. Think much cursing and angry neighbours downstairs left with a serious leak.

Now she’s forced to redo the renovation. But this time, with specialists. Seven professionals, each responsible for a specific craft. Slightly more expensive upfront, but dramatically better in outcome. It’s a simple lesson and one our industry continues to ignore.

When focus becomes a force

You should sense the same suspicion when reading a restaurant menu with dozens of different items that makes you question what it’s actually great at. Compare that to a restaurant specialising in one thing. Even with the best ingredients in the world, say, an A5 Wagyu rib-eye from Kagoshima, preparing that steak to perfection requires deep knowledge, precision and focus. You wouldn’t trust that dish to a generalist kitchen, so why do we accept it in brand building?

From the moment we at Chuck Studios decided to focus exclusively on food and drink, letting go of every non-edible client, the world finally made sense. Not smaller, but sharper. With that focus came depth in category understanding, product knowledge and consumer behaviour. Patterns became visible. Opportunities became tangible. Specialisation didn’t limit our perspective, it refined it.

Our neighbours are a PR firm that specialises in PR for the bicycle industry. Not scooters, not e-bikes, not mobility in general: just bicycles. If you are a serious bike manufacturer and you are not working with them, questions get asked. The same applies to a studio I know that creates medical imagery. They visualise things like viruses, DNA strands, microscopic processes. Over time, they have shaped how these things look in articles, in presentations, in public consciousness. Again, not generalists, but hyper-specialists. And because of that, they define the standard.

There is something almost amusing about how narrow these domains can become. But that narrowness is precisely what creates power. The deeper you go, the more you see. The more you see, the more intentional your decisions become.

Specialists to the rescue

Brand design has no problem embracing specialists. We commission typographers to craft bespoke letterforms. We engage sound agencies to build sonic identities. We invest in strategy, colour systems, motion languages. Entire disciplines exist to refine each of these elements.

When I ask a room of marketers in food and drinks how likely it is that their next campaign will feature their product, they look at me like I’m nuts. The answer is so obvious (‘eh, one hundred percent’) it feels weird to ask that question. Which leads to a simple, almost uncomfortable question: if your product is your most visible asset, why is its depiction not treated with the same rigour as typography, colour or sound? Because when it comes to the one thing food and drink brands show most, the product itself, we often default to generalists, or worse, to instinct.

More often than not, we are asked to make food look “delicious.” But ‘delicious’ is not a strategy. It’s the baseline all your competitors start from as well. To add to the disaster, most beers are yellow fizzy liquid with a white foam head. Chocolate is glossy and brown. Burgers are stacked symmetrically, front-facing, their layers carefully exposed. Across brands, across markets, across campaigns, it’s very likely that your product looks somewhat similar to that of your competitor.

Realising this led me to an epiphany a few years ago while shooting campaigns for both KFC and McDonald’s within days of each other. I found myself filming rather similar products (a chicken burger) in rather similar surroundings (a back of house kitchen). The decisions on angles, lenses, lighting, movement, props and general shot design were being made in solitude, largely on intuition, by silly ol’ me. It felt wrong. Because without being properly briefed, those choices are not expressions of the brand, they are expressions of the individual making them. And they shouldn’t be.

This led to a new way of thinking. If brands have a visual identity and a sonic identity, shouldn’t they also have a culinary identity? A defined, ownable system that determines how food appears consistently, recognisably and distinctively. Not just what looks good, but what looks like us. That day was the birthday of the Culinary Identity. And it is that day we transitioned from a specialist into a hyper-specialist.

The product is the brand

Food and drink is one of the most competitive and commoditised categories in the world. Products are inherently similar, ingredients overlap, formats repeat and the language surrounding them is saturated with the same promises: delicious, refreshing, energising, joyful. Difference is hard to find, which is precisely why it must be designed.

It also reveals an uncomfortable truth. Product communication has long been undervalued. Creative agencies love brand storytelling, the emotional territories, the long-form narratives, the campaigns that win awards. The product, by comparison, is often treated as functional, necessary, but not where the creative ambition lies. That is a mistake. Maybe, just maybe, consider asking a specialist to take care of that bit?

Some of the most distinctive brands already recognise this. Take Tony’s Chocolonely, who we crafted a unique culinary identity for. They’re most well known for their purpose of fighting inequality in the cocoa industry, and their loud design on shelf. The brand asked us to help become famous for their delicious chocolate too. Because Lord knows it is. We heroised the “chunkiness” of the bar and made a hero of that first piece you intuitively snap off and eat. We called it Neil (after Neil Armstrong, the OG of firsts) and made it famous. It’s a reminder that product-first thinking requires a deep understanding of what makes a product distinctive to elevate it.

In the world of brand design, we generally find brilliant design in shapes, colours, type, character, lay-out and much more. In food and drink, much more than any categories, the product is not just a supporting actor. It is the reason the brand exists. Brand books often devote dozens of pages to kerning, composition and design do’s and don’ts, only to reduce the way the product actually looks to a single, often underwhelming slide. We feel its depiction cannot be left to chance. It cannot be outsourced to habit or delegated to whoever happens to be on set. It requires intent, craft and obsession. In other words, it requires specialists.

When so much in your category is inherently similar from the product itself and how it’s built to how it’s consumed and typically shown, the pressure to be distinctive only increases. This is exactly why food depiction should be left to specialists in food depiction. Because when specialists do their job, the difference isn’t subtle. You will notice it.

As my daughter can confirm, as well as her downstairs neighbours: the specialists were a better choice.

Olaf van Gerwen is the founder and global creative director at Chuck Studios