What Does A Food Stylist Do?

A food stylist’s job is to prepare food for photography, video, film, and even live events. Being a food stylist requires culinary training as well as an artistic and technical background to help achieve the best promotional pictures and video of a dish. It also requires a lot of patience, experience, and willingness to try a lot of different (and sometimes unconventional) things. Great communication skills is also a plus for being able to understand what art directors, photographers, and producers are looking for and translating that into the final dish.

Food styling techniques can range from creating artificial dishes to laboriously scouring grocery stores for the best quality and most visually appealing ingredients to use, or cooking the same ingredients over and over again using different tools until the dish is perfect. For example, one food stylist who needs to create the perfect ice cream scoop for a commercial may put together fake ice cream using fat, frosting, and powdered sugar while another food stylist would have several freezers set at various temperatures and scoop real ice cream until they get the perfect scoop for a shot.

Many food stylists are very conscious of not being deceptive to consumers if their work is being featured in an advertisement, and some restaurants even require food stylists to use the same ingredients as those supplied to the restaurants and follow their chefs’ exact specifications to match what is actually sold in their establishments.

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Our food stylists in Nevada have extensive experience styling food for commercials, websites, television, print, catering events, and demo setups with their work being featured in such productions as Craziest Restaurants in America, Schwan’s food catalogs, and the 2015 Billboard Music Awards Red Carpet Party. The impressive list of clients and chefs our food stylists have worked with include but are not limited to Michael Mina, Bobby Flay, Daniel Boulud, Mandalay Bay, Wynn, MGM, Hard Rock Hotel, GQ, Food Network, Fox, and more.

Are you looking for a professional food stylist in Nevada? Check out our online Nevada Production Directory for a list of companies, individuals and crew in Nevada offering professional food styling services or drop by our office and pick up a free printed directory!

If you are a food stylist in Nevada and are not yet listed in our Nevada Production Directory, you can learn more about how to sign up for the NPD here.

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