Levy - Sustainable Food Week: Fermentation

Levy UK, part of Compass Group and the UK's leading sports and entertainment hospitality provider, launched their Sustainable Food Week initiative to spotlight the culinary techniques that reduce waste, extend shelf-life, and create new flavour dimensions from simple ingredients. The fermentation edition brought together Levy's chef brigade for a hands-on week of workshops and demonstrations exploring both traditional and modern fermentation methods — from classic kimchi and sauerkraut to kombucha brewing, sourdough cultures, and miso-making. Airframe Media was commissioned to document the week in a film that would serve both as an internal knowledge-sharing asset and as a public-facing piece demonstrating Levy's commitment to sustainable culinary innovation.

The production blended two visual languages: close-up food videography capturing the texture, colour, and transformation of fermenting ingredients — bubbles rising in kombucha jars, salt drawing moisture from cabbage leaves, the slow bloom of a sourdough starter — with presenter-led tutorial segments where Levy chefs explained each technique in their own words. Shot on a Sony FX6 with Sigma Art primes, the crew used 85mm f/1.4 for the macro food detail work and 35mm f/1.4 for the chef-led segments, balancing instructional clarity with an aesthetic that communicates the craft and patience inherent in fermentation. Lighting was natural and warm, using the existing kitchen environment supplemented with diffused LED panels to keep the focus on the food and the people working with it.

Audio was a dual approach: wireless lavaliers on the presenting chefs captured clean instructional dialogue, while a Sennheiser MKH 416 shotgun mic gathered the ambient kitchen soundscape — the quiet hiss of fermentation locks, the clink of jars, the rhythm of knife work. In post-production, the edit interwove the workshop coverage with the macro food sequences, paced deliberately to match the unhurried tempo of fermentation itself. The colour grade preserved the warm, earthy tones of the kitchen environment while ensuring food presentation shots remained vivid and appetising. The finished film has been used across Levy's internal communications platform, their sustainability microsite, and shared with Compass Group's wider UK network as an example of culinary sustainability in action.