Lürzer’s Archive Special Report
FOOD+ DRINK23 23 Can we escape red and yellow?
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FOOD + DRINK SPECIAL
For our second survey of trends and tastes in Food+Drink communication, we have focused on color.
The spectrum of taste
We invited a diverse group of creatives, all of whom have expertise in advertising food and drink, to reflect on the role of color in the field and to speculate on trends that might be affecting it. This is an area of specialism that combines strong traditions and restrictions with, also, vibrant and sometimes provocative short-term trends. For example, who now believes in “digital lavender” as a must-have in making food and drink attractive? Some industry pundits put their names behind that still largely invisible hue as a hot choice for 2023 … but it seems to have passed us by. However, none of our experts put their reputation there, we hasten to add. Instead, we will be feeding you a wide range of insightful and speculative observations while juxtaposing them with the hard evidence of the more outstanding food and drink ads of recent years drawn from Lürzer’s Archive. We suspect trend forecasting has a stronger, and a more scientifically-based, part to play around food and drink than in many sectors. There are clearly some very consistent values – all that red and yellow used around fast food, for example, which our experts will touch on in various ways over the coming pages. And yet there is also endless space for delightful innovation where almost any color can find its way, depending on the content and creativity around the brand and its underlying product truth.
Image: Sancho BBDO, Bogotá, L[A] 5/2019, full ad on page 174.
It is clear the rules are for bending and sometimes breaking … but understand the game before you do.
Vol 4/2023
142–143
Laura Petruccelli Co-Founder / Chief Creative Officer nice&frank, San Francisco 1
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Color can’t be observed as a stand-alone element when it comes to bringing food to life now that we mostly consume it through screens. You just have to look at the insane increase in TikTok trends around food and drinks to see that it’s the magical combination of color, sound, texture, and movement that gives personality to the way food shows up in people’s lives. There are 13 billion ASMR styled ‘oddly satisfying’ videos uploaded online right now. This tells us we have to think of color as part of a collection of things that make something appealing or engaging enough for people to care. Especially since most of the F&B brands that see success do so when they hand over the tools for people to create their own content.
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1 L[A] 2/2022, Ogilvy & Mather, Chicago 2 L[A] 2/2022, BETC Etoile Rouge, Paris 3 L[A] 2/2022, MetaDesign, Sydney 4 L[A] 2/2022, GUT, Miami 5 L[A] 2/2022, Leo Burnett, London 6 L[A] 3/2022, Brainsonic, Paris 7 L[A] 2/2015, Fluid, Bountiful, Utah 8 L[A] 1/2022, TBWA, Paris
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Vol 4/2023
144–145
Dan Goldberg PHOTOGRAPHER/DIRECTOR
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Shelley Smoler
FOOD + DRINK SPECIAL
Chief Creative Officer Droga5, London In advertising, food photography lived in a realm of deception: tomatoes so pumped they could audition for a bodybuilder contest, and shades of red that not even nature herself could replicate. It was all about perfection, even if that meant venturing into overdone illusions. But times have changed. We’ve embarked on a journey to capture the essence of food in all its honest glory. In our campaign for Planted, we dared to showcase food the way it’s meant to be devoured – sauce dripping down hands, bathed in the soft embrace of natural light, and adorned with colors that sing the song of authenticity. And our latest campaign for Philips Airfryer is a testament to celebrating the imperfect. We proudly displayed vegetables that had gracefully aged, their wrinkles and quirks worn like badges of honor. We wanted you to see these veggies as they truly are – not the superficial airbrushed models. Their transformation into a delectable, mouth-watering meal was portrayed from an angle that begged to be devoured. Bon Appetit.
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1 L[A] 5+6/2021, Out to Lunch, Athens 2 L[A] 5/2016, TBWA, Lisbon 3 L[A] 4/2018, Young & Rubicam (Y&R), São Paulo 4 L[A] 3+4/2020, Mother, London Lürzer’s Archive
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K AT R I N W I N N E R . D E
Izadora Petrovcic 1
Senior Art Director SOKO, São Paulo
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We’ve all heard that red and yellow are the optimal colors for stimulating consumer appetite, and it’s no surprise that CocaCola and McDonald’s have excelled at this for decades. While this theory is spot-on for the appetite appeal of certain products, we need to delve deeper. It’s crucial to recognize that in today’s landscape, we have new audiences engaging with new different channels, influencing the use of colors beyond established formulas. In this context, it’s our job to assist brands in becoming visually appealing through new uses of color in food and beverage advertising, whether through entertainment, employing vibrant colors that capture consumers’ attention on screens, or through more organic content with realistic colors, providing a greater sense of reality to the consumption of these products.
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1 L[A] 3+4/2021, Cossette, Montreal 2 L[A] 1+2/2021, Leo Burnett, Toronto, Leo Burnett, Bangkok 3 L[A] 2/2022, Grey Colombia, Bogotá 4 L[A] 5+6/2021, TBWA, Paris Lürzer’s Archive
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kriskirkhamphoto.com T: +44 (0) 7985 482 192 Agent: Style Department
Effie Kacopieros Creative Director Innocean, Sydney, Australia
The corner store is one of my most vivid childhood memories. Shelves of packaging towered over me, all vying for my attention with their vibrant colours and designs. The milk fridge did the same: bubblegum pink or strawberry? Or my favorite: iced coffee. Somehow, that muddy brown carton was never as convincing as the pastel pink, despite what was inside. Colors have the power to do more than just evoke emotion & feelings – they elicit actions. They can completely influence our choices in the supermarket aisle or restaurant.
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1 L[A] 1/2023, LOLA MullenLowe, Madrid 2 L[A] 3/2023, Athos Bolivia, Santa Cruz de la Sierra 3 L[A] 1/2022, Johannes Leonardo, New York 4 L[A] 2/2023, Meaning, Kobe, Japan 5 L[A] 1/2023, Creamos, Medellín, Colombia 6 L[A] 3+4/2021, The WHOLE Advertising, Shanghai
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FOOD + DRINK SPECIAL
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We eat with our eyes first. Always. Fresh green limes, crispy golden crusts and dewy indigo blueberries will always have more appeal than a beige chicken breast. It’s bland and unexciting. And nobody wants to eat beige food – with their eyes or their stomachs. This is something art directors and retouchers alike have known and utilized since day one. And today, we have another trick up our sleeves to sway palates with palettes: AI. Gone are the days of needing food stylists to ice-freeze veggies to lock in their crisp color. We now have a whole suite of tools to create mouth-watering images in an instant. But that doesn’t mean human creative craft is off the table. Because while machines may be able to learn and execute using color theory, they can’t be taught taste. And that’s the secret ingredient.
Vol 4/2023
156–157
Ezequiel Scarpini Creative Art Director LOLA Mullenlowe, Madrid
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It’s circa 1964. You are a French philosopher working on the importance of color. You open a magazine and find an ad for Panzani, a pasta brand. Looking around, you only see three main tones. Green, white and red. If you were more into hard science, you’d say it’s because those are predominant colors in nature. But remember, you are a philosopher. You ask yourself some tricky questions in order to get some tricky answers that would make Umberto Eco jealous. And suddenly, eureka! Behind the ad, there’s a hidden message. A big Italian flag right in your face. And the next thing you know, you’re over the Remington typing Réthorique de l’image. It’s 1964. Late at night. You are Roland Barthes wondering what to eat. Would you have a baguette with a slice of comté? I don’t think so. That’s the power of color.
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1 L[A] 4/2018, We Are Social, Rome, We Are Social, Milan 2 L[A] 3/2022, Ogilvy Brasil, São Paulo 3 L[A] 3/2022, Armando Testa, Turin 4 L[A] 4/2018, Young & Rubicam (Y&R), São Paulo 5 L[A] 5+6/2021, Bray Leino, Bristol, United Kingdom 6 L[A] 5+6/2020, Mosquito, Rome
Vol 4/2023
160–161
Represented by Marianne Campbell Associates marianne@mariannecampbell.com 415 433 0353
annabellebreakey.com
Myra Nussbaum President / Chief Creative Officer Havas, Chicago
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As an art director, I would venture to say that color is one of the most powerful tools a brand can use to build recall and saliency. When I think of the color red I instantly associate it with Target and Coca-Cola. Green takes me to Starbucks and John Deere. Brown brings to mind UPS, Snickers and M&Ms. Red and yellow are the chief food colors, evoking the tastebuds and stimulating the appetite. No wonder they’re also the key colors of the world’s most popular fast-food chain, McDonald’s. Research shows that 93% of buyers focus on the visual appearance when they are considering a product, and over 80% cited that color is a primary reason that they purchase a particular product. So consider color in everything you create for a brand because color can speak louder than words.
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FOOD + DRINK SPECIAL
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1 L[A] 4/2016, Impact BBDO, Dubai 2 L[A] 3/2018, DDB, Chicago 3 L[A] 3/2017, Africa, São Paulo 4 L[A] 5/2018, Cossette, Montreal 5 L[A] 1/2017, DDB, Chicago 6 L[A] 4/2014, Young & Rubicam (Y&R), Paris
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Vol 4/2023
164–165
John Koay Executive Creative Director Edelman, Hong Kong
Having worked on food and beverage brands for the past 20 years, the importance of color is still as important, despite all the changes we’ve had with techniques and technologies. It’s an important part of what makes an ad work well. From a sensory standpoint we know certain colors trigger cravings. Just look at KFC’s golden crispy fried chicken, or the rich warm colors of McDonald’s burgers – it’s crave-able and also distinctive for their brands too. But with the rise of technology, sometimes food visuals are too dependent on using 3D and AI, and often the colors are looking unnatural. This is where it starts to look a bit too surreal, overly vibrant and unappetising. Unfortunately relying on new technologies is cheaper and faster but at the cost of something looking fake. We need to be careful not to confuse convenience with quality, so let’s keep it real!
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1 L[A] 3+4/2020, FP7/DXB, Dubai 2 L[A] 2/2018, Thingy, London 3 L[A] 1/2020, M&C Saatchi Tel-Aviv 4 L[A] 4/2023, SEK, Helsinki, Client: Fazer 5 L[A] 3/2018, Ogilvy & Mather, Japan 6 L[A] 5+6/2020, Sid Lee, Paris 7 L[A] 3/2015, Mcgarrybowen, London 8 L[A] 2/2017, Fluid, Bountiful, Utah
Vol 4/2023
166–167
Rikard Köhler
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Art Director Media.Monks, Stockholm The expression ‘we eat first with our eyes’ couldn’t ring more true when discussing the role of food in advertising, and it’s commonplace that certain colors are associated with different emotions. But color saturation is perhaps more interesting than color hue. Brands promoting cheaper, faster, more accessible foods use saturated colors to convey accessibility, excitement, ease and urgency. More premium products gravitate towards more muted, calmer color palettes to indicate craft, nutrition, sustainability and freshness. However, since our climate needs us to adopt a more environmentally sustainable way of producing food, the demand for more ‘planet-friendly’ food is likely to grow. With the increase in demand, the supply will follow, which will lower the price for more sustainable foods. To differentiate themselves, it’s possible that brands, which traditionally had a calmer presence, adopt new color palettes to match the new price point and attract new audiences. In short, there’s a correlation between price and color saturation. However, there are always exceptions to the rule.
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1 L[A] 4/2017, Ampfy, São Paulo 2 L[A] 5/2015, PPM, São Paulo 3 L[A] 3/2019, TBWA, San Juan 4 L[A] 2/2022, Alma DDB, Miami Lürzer’s Archive
BILZELMAN.COM
David Patiño 1
Executive Creative Director Mass Digital, Bogotá
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What would the stomach be without color? Color has been and will be one of the most essential factors in stimulating the love for food. Love at first sight exists; the color makes you salivate, dilate your pupils, force your stomach to crunch, remember something, and delve into your subconscious. We are in charge of creating foods, unknown sensations, quality, and flavors that our brain interprets through data, that we have accumulated through experiences, color being an essential part of our sensory information. Nowadays we are exposed to food and drinks; TikTok and Instagram bombard us with images and videos showing that we are a generation that allows ourselves to be carried away by the impact and visual appeal, setting trends with a chromatic stomach that will always react to what we see.
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1 L[A] 3/2017, adam&eveDDB, London 2 L[A] 5/2013, RKCR/Y&R, London 3 L[A] 4/2017, DAVID the Agency, Miami 4 L[A] 5/2019, Sancho BBDO, Bogotá 5 L[A] 4/2018, DDB, Mexico City 6 L[A] 2/2018, BlackSheep.Works, Srinagar, India 7 L[A] 1/2019, Proximity, Bogotá
Vol 4/2023
174–175
JENNIFERSILVERBERG.COM
Ryan Crouchman Partner, VP, ECD Design LG2, Toronto
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Of the many creative tools within advertising and design, color speaks the loudest to our subconscious. Perhaps it’s a byproduct of natural evolution – for our ancestors the stakes were high when it came to knowing which color cues signaled danger, and which ones meant nourishment. Color definitely has the power to influence our decisions in various ways, and this holds true for all forms of communication. For example, within packaging design we typically use color to elicit flavor, quality and freshness. The world of branding relies on color to create brand distinction and build emotional connections with consumers, resulting in strong brand recall. Within advertising, color can help reinforce tone and mood, helping products break through in a highly saturated environment. Color is a flexible element, it's also finicky and extremely subjective. But when it’s done right, it makes all the difference.
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FOOD + DRINK SPECIAL
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1 L[A] 200best packaging design 15, Alastair Whiteley, Matt Gandy 2 L[A] 4/2018, Energy BBDO, Chicago 3 L[A] 200best packaging design 15, Andy Black, Peter O’Connor 4 L[A] 3/2018, Mother, London 5 L[A] 3/2015, Young & Rubicam (Y&R), Kuala Lumpur 6 L[A] 2/2019, MP Publicidade, Vila Velha, Brazil 7 L[A] 200best packaging design 17, B&B Studio, London
Vol 4/2023
178–179
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1 L[A] 1/2020, Propeg, Rio de Janeiro 2 L[A] 6/2017, Ruf Lanz, Zurich 3 L[A] 2/2020, Leo Burnett, Dubai 4 L[A] 1+2/2021, adam&eveDDB, London
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We are a full-service image house based in Milan, active since 2014 and hyper-specialized in food and drinks photography.
Our clients include Barilla, Bahlsen, Kellogg’s, Mulino Bianco, Nestlé, S.Pellegrino, Wasa, Sammontana, Molinari, Zuegg, Averna.
www.foodpirate.studio @food.pirate.studio
Hollie Newton
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Creative Consultant, London 1
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No matter the year, the trends, or the media you’re communicating in, one fact has remained true since the dawn of the saucepan ... beige food is the tastiest. You know what I’m talking about. Golden mashed potato. The browned crispy bits of a biryani. Rich chestnut-hued gravy bubbling free from flaked and honeyed pastry. Alas, beige food is also the hardest thing in the world to photograph and film. Anything studio-lit and over-retouched looks ‘processed’. Fake. And deeply unappetising. The fact is, taste appeal lies in the imperfections, and it’s the content creators in the digital space who are nailing it. MOB Kitchen. Delicious Magazine. Gill Meller. Not Another Cooking Show. The food is beige. The amount of butter is incendiary. And in these bleak and worrying times, comfort food is all we’re after. You’d better throw yourself into the ‘red to yellow’ part of the color wheel.
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1 L[A] 2/2018, Energy BBDO, Chicago 2 L[A] 5/2019, Ogilvy & Mather, Hong Kong 3 L[A] 1/2023, Mother, London, Client: Reese’s 4 L[A] 3/2023, TBWA, Brussels, TBWA, Paris
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P. 303.249.4112 CHADCHISHOLMCREATIVE.COM
FOOD + DRINK SPECIAL
What’s in your basket now? Did you buy the aforementioned case for beige? Some maybe, most perhaps not. It’s true that a lot of us like to eat a range of food that is united within that zone of bland coloring. However, the packaging at purchase, or the presentation on the plate, almost certainly involves much brighter coloration than the reality of beige. Or, indeed, any excessively consistent color. It’s like selling clear spirit: you can use a clear bottle of clear liquid but there’s many examples of brands (indeed, a majority) where the advertising displays a raging spectrum, suggesting where the mind can go with a strong drink or two rather than staying strictly true to the color of what the body has ingested. A similar question may deconstruct the “rules” around red and yellow’s dominance in fast food. Yes, this color pairing may now be a universal subliminal symbolic promise of comfort and convenience but could it not also have been quite otherwise? Tradition is not hard science. There are many successful food and drink brands in many other colors, some of them very popular (Coke Zero, for example), some of them even less representative of the actual product truth.
Lürzer’s Archive Special Report
FOOD FOOD+ DRINK23 23 Can we escape red and yellow?
Lürzer’s Archive
LÜRZER’S ARCHIVE FOOD + DRINK Client Arcor Agency Athos Bolivia, Santa Cruz de la Sierra Creative Direction Fernando Fernandes, Pablo Jove Art Direction Fito Chipana Ramos, Ruben Ruiz, Daniela Serrate Copywriter Victor William Mendez Ugarte, Mani Cáceres Méndez, Daniela Hernández Photographer Vale Montoya, Thalía González, Rebeca Gutiérrez Illustrator Alvaro Cuentas Paredes, Adrian Méndez Akamine, Luis Acha Typographer Daniela Serrate Digital Artist Angel Rapu
Our experts have shared some insights and here we might sift the underlying tendencies. When it comes to riding the trends of food and drink, the cocktail of color may well involve the following: lock on to tradition where relevant: people want to put stuff into their mouth that they can trust and believe in. lock on to human psychology even more: people don’t necessarily understand why they do what they do with what they eat and drink. lock on to creativity: outstanding food and drink ads often tweak the rules a bit – or a lot – by using strong colors that distinguish brands rather than replicate. finally, unlock your creativity and make your own rules. Somebody has to! If that seems a little less than serious, we point you back to our commentators and to the range of standout works we have selected to surround their comments. There are clearly color tendencies based on hard evidence and hard science, plus quite a lot of social science … and then there is creativity. It can be argued that only maverick, unpredictable creativity can assuredly deliver differentiating and defensible brand value by inventing a space for a brand and drawing the human imagination into it. Once you have added that volatile ingredient, be sure to test before use …
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