Here at Dish Works, our passion for making beautiful culinary content knows no bounds. On any given day, you’ll find our studio bustling with activity: salmon filets sizzling on the stove top, cakes being expertly frosted, art directors painstakingly placing tomatoes on a salad to get the perfect shot. Bringing our clients’ visions to life on screen is what we absolutely love to do.
And while we don’t play favorites about different kinds of services we offer, we must admit that at the moment, we’re particularly smitten with making recipe Reels for our clients. We call these snack-sized videos ReelToks.
What are ReelToks? They are influencer-style vertical videos that are meant to live on Instagram Reels, TikTok and Pinterest Video Pins (get more deets here). Basically, they are a clever, budget-friendly way to take the best of what social media influencers can do, but keep all of the creative control in the hands of your team. They are a great way to use owned content to engage with your fans and possibly even take your brand viral.
@dishworks Welcome to our food studio and test kitchen. Our food content team offers recipe development, food styling, food and recipe photography, lifestyle and product photography and recipe, appliance or cookware video production for any platform including Tiktok, Reels or Amazon. We make food photography and videography easy! #foodcontentstudio #foodcontent #recipedeveloper #recipedevelopment #foodstylist #foodcontentcreator #foodstyling #foodcontentcreators #foodphotographer #recipephotography ♬ original sound – Dish Works
In this moment, with the social media landscape ever-changing, there is a lot of pressure on brands to adapt and evolve. ReelToks help you keep up with trends, and always look amazing and relevant, thanks to our incredible culinary team, and our collective obsession with food and video trends. Unlike smaller creative teams that may have their limitations, our well-rounded crew can pretty much do it all, from recipe development, to stunning visuals, to soothing ASMR audio, to animation.
To dig deeper into why we slay Reels/TikTok so hard (and why this makes these videos such valuable assets for our clients), we chatted with Dish Works’ Creative Director, Anna Miron. She works closely with our clients and has first-hand experience in the many facets of our process.
Anna, what are some of the challenges that brands can face in making influencer-style social media content?
Anna Miron: Well, first, “influencer-style” is a broad term. There are so many ways to approach food-styling, shooting and editing. So to start, we always make sure we know specifically what type of look the client is going for. Do they want something intimate, close-up and slower paced? Or, do they want something fast-paced with higher energy? Do they want something glossy or more homemade-looking? We can drastically adjust the way we shoot, edit and style.
How important is it to be “on-trend” when it comes to this type of content?
It’s pretty crucial. We are always on top of new trends, new transitions, new ways of editing, styles of filming. We give this stuff a lot of consideration. Our whole team is active on social media, so we are seeing trends that pop up and we’re offering them as recipe and content suggestions to our clients. It’s not about what we want to make — we’re always approaching it from the question: What does the client need for their brand voice?
Also, as trends change and progress, we are able to re-edit and re-package past content that we’ve made for clients. That might mean shortening or re-cutting an existing recipe video, adding different sound or music, or removing text. In offering those updates and refreshes, Dish Works is a partner beyond the delivery of one project. Our team carefully archives all of our past projects, so we have our clients’ assets readily accessible. We’re solutions-oriented every step of the way.
Speaking of social media trends, what’s a major one you’ve predicted or seen?
When ASRM first became a big thing, we had already been experimenting with recipe videos that focused on intimate moments and close-up action. And now we’ve seen this remarkable tone-shift, from instructional to inspirational, in social media culinary content. Also, where Reels used to be 60-second videos, they’ve gotten shorter and shorter, and are now like 10 seconds!
We’ve helped our clients adjust to these changes by making videos more inspirational, and focusing on actions that draw the viewer in, and driving home the taste appeal. I often suggest to clients that we produce beautiful recipe videos, and from those, we can pull all these little moments, so they’re walking away with multiple assets. We can cut videos into lengths that perform well on the different social platforms. It’s hard to say what will be performing well in 4 or 6 months, but our goal is to help our clients anticipate the trends and stay flexible enough to adapt for future needs.
If you’re interested in adding these valuable social media recipe video assets to your brand’s content marketing arsenal, drop us a line! We’d love to hear from you and learn how we can help your brand stand out from the competition.