The world's two leading food photography agencies join forces
StockFood and PhotoCuisine, the world's two largest agencies for food photography, have signed a global partnership agreement. The two companies, widely recognized as market leaders in high-end culinary photography, will join forces from March 1st 2015.
According to the agreement, PhotoCuisine, based in Paris and the reference for food photography in France, will exclusively represent the StockFood collection in its domestic market. In addition to PhotoCuisine's own 215,000 images, the combined offering will provide PhotoCuisine customers in France with access to the entire StockFood collection of over 520,000 images created by 1,100 specialist food photographers.
StockFood, with headquarters in Munich and offices in the UK and the United States, is today's largest food image agency. Thanks to the new partnership, StockFood will represent the PhotoCuisine collection globally, with the exceptions of France and Belgium. The PhotoCuisine collection, with its strong focus on the culinary delights of French cuisine, is expected to be well-received by the community of StockFood customers in 60 countries. Furthermore, StockFood will also manage the international distribution channel of PhotoCuisine from March 2015 onward.
For more than a decade, both agencies are primarily known for bringing exclusive rights-managed food images to the market. The combined offering of both culinary collections will provide customers with unique access to more than 700,000 premium images created by many award-winning food photographers. In addition, customers of both agencies will have access to thousands of high-end food features, reportages, videos and recipes available in numerous languages.
The agreement between StockFood and PhotoCuisine can be considered a strong message of unity within the highly competitive stock image industry. Both companies are privately owned, remain fully independent and will continue to maintain separate brands and websites. Their partnership will primarily serve to strengthen their business propositions both to the creative contributor community as well as professional food image customers.
Martin Skultety, General Managing Director of StockFood, is delighted about this alliance: "While having been direct competitors for many years, we have always shared respect for the exceptional work and the high ethical standards of each other. It would seem to require a very long journey to turn former competitors into trustful partners, but in our case it actually wasn't. There is so much to share and we are looking forward to addressing lots of further opportunities by bringing all our expertise together."
Pierre Hussenot, director and co-founder of PhotoCuisine along with Pierre Cabannes, is equally delighted about the alliance: "We are extremely pleased about the partnership with StockFood. For many years, our primary focus has been on the French market. Thanks to the StockFood collection, our French clients will now be able to access three times more premium images and videos which is going to be a terrific value for them. Furthermore, this partnership will open the doors of our collection to food customers around the planet. This is great news for us. It's going to be such a breath of fresh air."