The Culinary Identity
A film director turned food and drink specialist who spent years as a generalist before deciding, around 15 years ago, that distinctiveness and specialism were everything.
"Otherwise, I will be just an abstract artist kind of filmmaker who doesn't understand our world."
Olaf van Gerwen is Founder and Global Creative Director of Chuck Studios, a specialist food and drink film and photography studio he co-founded with his wife Ellen around 15 years ago. He is known for arguing that most food advertising sells the category rather than the brand, and for a practice he calls culinary identity, codifying the distinctive way a brand's food and drink should look.
Van Gerwen came into the industry through an arts obsessed childhood, drawn to sketching, drawing and music before studying audio visual and moving into filmmaking. The beautiful Dutch commercials of the mid 1990s, along with work like the Shell ad featuring Naomi Campbell and the Guinness horses, convinced him he wanted to direct ads. He spent years as a generalist film director working in storytelling, comedy and lifestyle, and by his own account was moderately successful without feeling he had found his true field.
The turning point came when Ellen, a producer, began working at a food photography company. Van Gerwen saw a category that was always beautiful, universally liked and resistant to downturns, and the couple founded Chuck Studios. After five years doing many kinds of work, they narrowed to food and drink only, a decision he describes as the moment his working life made sense. Today van Gerwen consults with large brands on culinary identity, credits the Mark Ritson Mini MBA with giving him the language of brand management, and has built signature work including the Lipton Ice Tea Lipting ritual, developed with Design Bridge and PepsiCo and Unilever.
Do not look like your category.
"No, you don't. You need the same campaign, but make it feel fresh."
Van Gerwen rejects the reflex to launch a new campaign every season. He argues that brand building compounds only over years, and points to decades of consistency behind the campaigns everyone remembers. The job, he says, is disguised repetition: the same idea made to feel fresh, again and again.
"A 20-second or longer ad needs about seven, a minimum of seven brand cues in it to more or less guarantee recognition by consumers."
For van Gerwen an identity is how a brand is recognised beyond its name. He cites research that an ad needs a minimum of seven distinctive cues to be recognised, and warns that the answer is famous codes rather than more logos. Once those codes are established, he says, working with them becomes playful and powerful.
"I still think it's fundamentally important to know how brands grow."
Van Gerwen credits learning how brands grow with transforming his relationship with clients. Whether your craft is strategy, copy, lighting or food styling, he argues, understanding brand fundamentals makes the work sharper and the conversations better. Without it, he says, you are just an artist who does not understand the client's world.
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