Right, so I need to preface this by saying: I am not a food person. I mean, I eat. Obviously. But I'm not one of those people who photographs their lunch. Never have been.
And then we took on this campaign for a food delivery company (no, I can't say which one) and suddenly I was coordinating shoots in four cities across three continents in eight weeks. Brixton. Mumbai. Notting Hill. Manchester. The brief was “street food culture” and the budget was, let's say, optimistic for what we were trying to do.
Brixton Was Chaos (in the Best Way)
We landed and our fixer had arranged for us to shoot at a suya spot in Yaba at 6am. Six in the morning. For grilled meat. I thought there'd be no one there. There were about forty people already queuing.
The creator we'd partnered with — incredible woman, massive following in the Afro-Caribbean foodie space — just walked straight into the crowd and started filming. No staging, no setup, no “can you move to the left a bit.” Just her phone, the smoke from the grill, and genuine conversation with the people around her. It was the best content from the entire campaign and we barely directed any of it.
That was the first lesson: get out of the way. Seriously. When you're working with creators who actually belong to the culture, the worst thing you can do is over-direct.
Mumbai Nearly Didn't Happen
I won't go into the full details because it's still a bit of a sore point. But basically, the permissions for one of our shoot locations fell through 48 hours before we were meant to start. A dosa stall owner didn't want cameras near his business. Fair enough. His spot, his rules.
So our creator pivoted. She took us to her grandmother's neighbourhood instead. This tiny street in Dadar where she'd eaten chaat every Saturday as a kid. And the content ended up being so much more personal than anything we'd planned. She was showing us her actual childhood, not a curated version of “Indian street food.”
Second lesson: the plan falling apart is sometimes the plan.
Kingston Changed My Life (Specifically the Jerk Chicken)
I'm not being dramatic. I have genuinely not been the same since. We shot at this spot in Trench Town — proper roadside, oil drum smoker, the whole thing — and the owner gave us each a plate while we were setting up. I took one bite and I think I made a sound that was inappropriate for a professional setting.
The content from Kingston had this energy that was just different. Everyone was dancing. The creator was dancing. The camera operator was dancing. At one point I was holding a reflector and also dancing. It was 34 degrees and nobody cared.
London Was... London
It rained. Of course it rained. We were shooting at a market in Brixton and it absolutely poured. But actually, it ended up giving the footage this moody, cinematic quality that worked really well in the edit. The creator put it best: “This is real London food culture — eating jerk in the rain and pretending you're fine.”
The campaign did really well. The numbers were solid. But what I remember most is sitting in a plastic chair in Brixton at 6am, eating suya from a pop-up that was too hot, watching a creator do what she does best, and thinking: yeah, this is why we do this.
Marcus K. is Head of Partnerships at Mosaic Collective. He writes occasionally when something moves him enough to sit down and type.