Recipe Films

LIDL is one of the UK’s biggest supermarket chains, known for surprising customers with quality seasonal ranges well beyond what people expect from a discount retailer.

LIDL wanted a series of recipe films to showcase the special ingredients they’d be stocking that Christmas – including, for the first time, whole fresh lobsters and fresh turkeys – fronted by TV chefs Lesley Waters and Nick Nairn, with every recipe designed around Christmas hosting.

We worked with each chef on a separate day, covering two full recipes per chef — both consummate TV professionals, slick and assured in front of the camera. Building a full Christmas kitchen set in August came with its own very real challenge, though: fresh turkeys, which LIDL wouldn’t actually have in stock until much closer to Christmas itself, were almost impossible to track down in the height of summer. We needed four turkeys in total to get everything right, and once we had them, cooking that many at once indoors would have turned our location into an oven of its own — so we ended up hiring two outdoor ovens just to keep food prep manageable. All set inside a fully-dressed festive kitchen build, delivered in just ten days.

The films became LIDL’s Christmas marketing tool that year, running across their website, email campaigns and social channels right through the run-up to Christmas.