A simple dish of food can represent so much more than what’s presented on the plate. One meal can carry with it the story of a culture, ingredients and their origins, the history of how one family has made the same dish for generations—and all the people involved in bringing everything from its starting point to the table. There’s so much wrapped up in food in general, and it’s no different when it comes to the industry built around it. Grey Sky Films’ portfolio includes a vast array of food-related videos we’ve produced for clients that run the gamut, from large globally recognized brands to small specialty labels, and most things in between. While we’ve done projects within many areas of the food & beverage industry, we’ve found that specialty imports is one of the most complex and exciting ones, presenting challenges and adventures rarely available in other parts of this realm.
What’s So Different or Interesting About Video Marketing for Specialty Food Imports?
Part of Grey Sky Films’ approach to working with our clients is to really understand what they do. We’re not just there to show up and shoot; we’re offering deep collaboration to help realize their vision and help them succeed. We research and learn from clients when we kick things off, but we learn volumes through the video-making journey, and aim to build expertise in working within each sector. Within the specialty import food products niche, we’ve built a good deal of specified knowledge of its inner workings and what sets it apart from others.
One unique aspect of this niche is that the marketing funnel is less direct than most in food and beverage. The context often looks something like this: a small, family-owned operation that’s gained traction in their home country is discovered by, or reaches out to, a larger importer/exporter, and a partnership is formed. Through that partnership, the small operation’s products are introduced into bigger markets around the globe, such as the U.S. market, helping the brand grow and expand exponentially. Region-appropriate packaging labels and marketing campaigns need to be created to enable that growth, and the marketing is typically not direct-to-consumer. Bringing what are often small brands from other countries to the U.S. involves building awareness among pre-consumer audiences like small gourmet markets, niche-specific purveyors, and supermarket purchasing departments, since these groups provide the entry point into this country’s large and desirable food & beverage market.
Given the nature of target audiences for video marketing here, the purposes and delivery mechanisms for these videos are also different and more varied than what we’d see for other categories within the sector. More often than not, videos for these international products aren’t commercials like the ones you’d see in typical direct-to-consumer brand advertising (for example, any ad you’d see for Budweiser or Kraft), so filming isn’t always as straightforward as something like a studio shoot for, say, cake or tequila. Instead, these videos tend to feel more educational and may be used as sales tools during meetings or at conferences, as training materials for specialists like cheesemongers, or to boost product awareness inside retail locations. Our deliverables need to convey not only the story behind the product, but how to use it, why anyone should use it, and the versatility each item brings to the table. In addition to all this, our projects in this arena often involve not only our direct clients, but their partners, as well. With more stakeholders at the table, we always need to ensure the collective vision is being achieved.
Visual Storytelling for the Specialty Imports Niche
What’s at the core of any specialty food item’s value? What’s most important to document and share so that audiences really grasp that value? For so many of these imports, it’s about origin, sourcing, and authenticity. What truly makes a brand special is its heritage–the history, tradition, and standards that have been brought forward from the product’s beginnings. This is the type of context where visual storytelling is unparalleled in its ability to meet client needs – to paint a complete picture of a brand’s legacy for retailers as well as end consumers.
So, what kind of video provides the right level of detail and information that resonates with food experts and end consumers alike? During our 25 years in video production, Grey Sky Films has done almost every food-oriented shoot imaginable. We’ve made videos about specific ingredients and how to use them, recipes and how to follow them, and even shot some celebrity chef videos. But the type that has the biggest impact for small specialty food brands is the “how it’s made” variety, and it just so happens that this kind of food-related film has taken us on some pretty epic adventures.
Visual Storytelling for Specialty Food Brands
Telling the story behind the ingredients and their journey from farm to table helps build trust in partners and end consumers.
Working with Atalanta (Part of the Gellert Global Group)
If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ve heard us talk a lot about partnership, because it’s a core value of our approach to our work. We always aim to build lasting relationships with our clients, and to show up as a trusted partner and collaborator that understands the vision at hand. But this can look strikingly different from industry to industry, because to earn that trust, we have to really grasp the nuances of a sector’s inner workings. In June we talked about how we’ve accomplished that within the healthcare industry. This month we’ve been exploring our longstanding partnership with Atalanta Corporation, global importer of international foods.
Over the past 10 years, we’ve worked closely with their Head of Sales and Marketing, Marissa DeMaio, to create productions that educate food buyers and outlets on potentially unfamiliar products and their value. We’ve had the pleasure of seeing her in action as she partnered with everyone involved in making a product, and consistently created the right messaging and packaging to bring them to U.S. consumers. And best of all, we’ve worked in a collaborative fashion to realize the vision for a wide variety of videos, many of which were part of Atalanta’s 360° marketing campaigns. These videos were made for multiple delivery mechanisms including streaming and social media, and have been played inside supermarkets and at large conferences like the Fancy Food Show in New York and San Francisco.
From a production standpoint, Atalanta has certainly kept things interesting, and we at Grey Sky Films always appreciate that! Since Atalanta specializes in identifying foods from around the world for import into the U.S., many of these video projects have brought us to other countries. International shoots are very different from domestic ones. The most basic reason is that, if you miss a shot, you can’t just hop back over and try again. So, fastidious scheduling is of the utmost importance; and for a how-it’s-made project for an international food brand, there’s a lot to schedule.
Here are some of the unique complexities we uncovered along the way:
- It can be difficult to bring larger gear through airports and on planes. Sometimes you need to find gear suppliers or even additional crew members in the region where you’ll be filming.
- You have to learn about the processes you’ll be filming, as well as all the steps involved, in advance. This way, you can plot a logical course that ensures you’re able to film each step and (hopefully) move from location to location in the most efficient way possible.
- If your crew doesn’t speak the language where you’re filming, you’ll need to have liaisons/translators for the entire shoot. They’re critical in helping to ensure that interviews are conducted properly, and that you’re getting all the information you hoped for.
- The project plan needs to account for transcription and translations.
- You need to familiarize yourself with the region & terrain in advance. How many locations are you filming? How far apart are they–and more importantly, how long will it take to travel between them?
- Regulations in the product’s country of origin are different from the U.S., and product information needs to be translated into English. This means that there’s different packaging for each country, and we need to film the finished product in every packaging variation (and be sure the right packaging shows up in the appropriate edit!).
Filming the European Ingredients-to-Table Journey
Our first Atalanta adventure was back in 2015, and this brought us to beautiful Parma, Reggio Emilia, and Asiago to capture the age-old processes of making Parmigiano Reggiano and Asiago cheeses, and in fact we’ve done many more cheese-related projects with them since then. Today we’re experts at catching every little detail in the cheesemaking process, but there was a lot to learn that first time around. We were able to leverage our obsessive attention to pre-production to ensure everything went as planned, and we also started to hone new skills in filming food operations and coordinating highly-complex travel shoots. Understanding the region of origin for each style of cheese, working with the Italian consortiums that uphold their strict standards, and traveling from one location to another really showed us the ropes.
Over the past 10 years, we’ve produced how-it’s-made videos for cheese brands in the U.S., Canada, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. Because so many of the specialty brands our clients work with are small, family-owned operations, many of them can feel like mini-documentaries. It’s usually the tale behind the product’s taste and the people who produce it that shows differentiation. To successfully tell the story of a brand’s legacy, we need to capture everything that happens from the origin of ingredients to the tables where the finished products land. There’s nothing like seeing each step of the process in this level of detail to build understanding of, and trust in, an unfamiliar brand. This involves filming where the ingredients begin, the pastures where the cows, goats, or other animals graze, the rivers that feed those pastures, the processing facilities, and the people performing each operation. Sometimes this means having to travel across relatively far-flung locations to get footage of everything and everyone involved.
The natural surroundings of a product’s origin often get the spotlight, because they’re such a critical part of how the final product comes out. Through our experience capturing the art of cheesemaking, we’ve learned that the land itself is especially important here, because – as it turns out – it’s mainly the grass the cows eat and the water in the area that influences a cheese’s final taste and texture. We also need to surface the people involved and gather their own origins stories. We interview the farmers and others who tend to the land and animals, and of course we interview the owners and founders of the companies that make these specialty items.
For every one of these projects, we also visit the facility where the milk is transformed into its final form. We talk to people who manage the processing facilities and those who perform different functions at these locations, and document each step of the cheesemaking process performed on location. This is where shooting always gets really interesting. Though the cheesemaking process is actually fairly straightforward, there’s a lot to learn about filming the steps involved. A film crew needs to know exactly what the order of operations is if they want to get footage of each step, because we’re essentially working with an assembly line. The process at any given facility is what it is. If you miss out on filming any steps, the cheesemakers can’t go back and repeat it just for you!
These are the kinds of discoveries made through hands-on experience and get built upon over time. When we started filming food-making operations like this years ago, we learned quickly how to streamline our planning, gear, and crew to work efficiently at each location type – especially processing facilities. We figured out when it made sense to rent gear in the country where we’re filming and what we can easily bring on each flight. By 2025 when we made the Il Villaggio videos, we knew even more, like where and how to buffer our shooting schedules to allow for non-domestic travel from one location to another, taking into account how trains, planes, and hired drivers work in international climes. It’s this sort of deep, niche-specific experience that’s helped us build and strengthen our partnerships and hone our ability to aim high and deliver above & beyond.
Authentic Brand Storytelling
The strongest food marketing videos reveal the people, places, and purpose behind the product.
Mifroma – from Pasture to Packaging
We wrote in a recent post about the How Do YOU Fondue? videos we produced for Atalanta and Mifroma, and how we went on to do another campaign for them soon afterwards. Well, that next project brought us to Switzerland, where we shot for not just one, but two Mifroma marketing campaigns. While one campaign was the fondue follow-up, Where Do YOU Fondue?, our client also wanted to leverage this trip to film how Gruyere is made. Did we have fun with this one!
The Gruyere videos were in the same vein as others we’d produced in the past, where we captured the whole process from grazing to labeling, highlighting the nuances that differentiate this particular cheese. Documenting a product steeped in such longstanding tradition meant we got to witness time-tested practices while filming in some amazing locations. We had the privilege of filming the freest free-range cows we could imagine, as they grazed happily on the slopes of the Fribourg Pre-Alp hillsides, in the shadow of Gruyere Castle. In addition to the video, to maximize the amount of content derived during the shoot, we also brought in a food photographer to get beauty shots of everything. We deeply enjoyed producing this video, which illustrates each finely-tuned step of creating this artisanal product with the same techniques used for almost 1,000 years.
Making Fondue-ing More Fun
While we always work with our clients to bring them optimal value for their investment in video marketing, some situations offer more opportunity than others to get super creative with delivering on big ideas. The How Do YOU Fondue campaign was a study in that sort of creativity, and we had a blast making it happen. We wanted to create relatable and lighthearted scenarios that would introduce U.S. audiences to Mifroma’s Fondue Express, which finally offered a quick, convenient way to enjoy this traditional meal. To help keep costs down, instead of renting expensive locations, we leveraged the homes and offices of our own and our client’s team. Members of our own crew even acted in some of the video spots, and Marissa herself styled the food.
For the follow-up campaign, we took the big ideas and creative execution several steps further. We got inspired by those classic Peppermint Patty commercials, where people would describe how eating this candy gave them the sensation of being atop a mountain or on a cruise. We wanted to recreate that feeling of being transported, but unlike those old commercials, actually do some transporting. So we came up with the idea of filming 2 locations for each main character: one where they get caught eating fondue in a mundane location, and another where they’re magically enjoying Fondue Express somewhere more exotic.
Accomplishing this movie magic presented such fun challenges. First, there was coming up with the creative for each video spot, where we aimed to develop guffaw-evoking scenarios as relatable as those for Where Do YOU Fondue. Dana created storyboards and led the brainstorming process that led to ridiculous-yet-real-world situations like one that would drive an overwhelmed mom to hide in the bathtub to enjoy a fondue break. Then there was making sure we could get every main character actor filmed in and around New Jersey and some splendid spots in Switzerland. And then there was coordinating the entire production (plus the Gruyere how-it’s-made video project), locally as well as internationally.
We managed to close the gap between Hollywood ideas and real-world budgets, in part by enlisting our own team—and our client—to star in these videos (Mark, Dana, Eric and Marissa actually starred in this campaign!). We were even able to get footage of Mark enjoying delicious melty cheese inside Gruyere Castle. Oh, and no Swiss sojourn would be complete without a bit of skiing, so we did that, too.
If you need a laugh, you can watch all the Fondue Express videos here.
What Our Client Has to Say
The first project Grey Sky ever did with us was over in Italy, and it was a 10 day trip. And they did such a great job that even when we got back to the States, the customer requested that they continue working on this video and film portions of the end of the video in their store. Grey Sky Films made a really lasting impression even on the customer, beyond us, for their attention to detail, the way they build relationships, and the way they were able to pivot and be nimble. All the people in my world are not marketing people – we are food people. So, sometimes the dots aren’t connected on what those steps are that you’d typically have in a creative brief from an agency for example. They’ve always done such a great job of filling in the blanks, making recommendations, and working with us from a budget standpoint, as well. They’ve always wanted to do a good job and help us, and they’ve just hit the mark time & time again. They are our go-to film partner.
