Babo’s Panjiri
Roles - Creative Direction, Photography and Production
The client
Babo's Panjiri is built around a recipe that has travelled through generations of a Pakistani family — a nutrient-dense, ghee-roasted blend of nuts, seeds, and whole grains that has been a fixture of Pakistani homes for centuries. A snack, a postpartum ritual, a grandmother's staple. The founder had taken that recipe and turned it into a brand: Babo's Kitchen, Panjiri Granola. In Pakistan, everyone knows what panjiri is. In the US, almost no one does. That education gap was the central creative problem the entire project had to solve — and it shaped every decision from concept to shot list.
The brief
A full rebrand and visual refresh covering the core Panjiri Granola line and the launch of a new product: the Panjiri Crunch Bar, a 54% cacao dark chocolate bar made with panjiri and produced in collaboration with another maker. The work needed to do three things simultaneously: introduce a culturally specific product to a western audience unfamiliar with it, position panjiri as a modern granola alternative without erasing its heritage, and celebrate the Pakistani story behind the brand with the specificity and pride it deserved. The new packaging was redesigned as part of the rebrand — which meant the shoot couldn't begin until it arrived.
The challenge
The client came to the project with a story and a conviction, but no framework for how to translate either into a visual language. She was new to brand building in the fullest sense — no existing imagery, no shot list, no reference point for what a shoot of this scale would involve. My role started well before a camera was picked up. We worked through the brand story together: who she was selling to, what they already understood, and what the imagery needed to teach them in a single glance. The most important creative decision on this project wasn't a prop or a colour — it was figuring out how to make panjiri legible to a western consumer without making it feel like something it wasn't.
The prop budget was tight. New packaging was delayed, compressing the production window significantly. We worked within all of it.
The process
The visual direction I landed on was the colours and textures of Pakistan itself — warm terracotta, dusty pink handmade tiles, saffron and marigold. A palette rooted in cultural specificity rather than generic wellness-brand neutrality. Every prop choice built outward from that: marigold garlands framing tile backdrops, gold bangles and jewellery on every hand in frame, the boldness of the packaging's illustrated artwork echoed in the surfaces and tones surrounding it.
The shoot was structured across two visual registers. The granola world was bright, sun-drenched, and celebratory — the pink tile wall with marigold garlands, two hands passing bags to each other like a handoff between generations, panjiri raining down into an open palm against the tiles with gold catching the light. The granola-on-granola shot — the bag laid flat in a bed of the actual product — was a deliberate choice to solve the education problem visually: before a word of copy, the viewer understands exactly what's inside.
The Crunch Bar called for something different. Against a dark, moody backdrop with deep green silk and traditional embroidered fabric, the packaging and the bar itself felt electric — the pink and green speckled chocolate vivid against the richness of the clothing and jewelry. Where the granola shots were open and joyful, the Crunch Bar shots were close, textural, and indulgent.
The most intentional image in the series was the mother and daughter in traditional dress — one in cobalt blue velvet with green tassel earrings, the other in gold-embroidered green fabric — holding the packaging together in full sun. One image. The entire brand story in a single frame.
The client prepped the food throughout. I directed the styling, the light, the props, and the narrative logic of every setup — and built the shot list from scratch around the story she came in with.
The outcome
The imagery was published across the Babo's Kitchen website, social channels, and marketing materials. For the client, it was her first major investment in brand photography — and the work gave Babo's Panjiri a visual identity that finally matched the ambition and cultural richness of what she had been building.
Creative POV
This project sits at a specific point in my development as a Creative Director — it's where I standardised my process and understood clearly where my strengths in direction actually lie. When a client arrives with a story and not much else, the ability to translate that into a strategic shot list, a cultural visual language, and a sequence of images that builds a world from the ground up — that's the job. The education challenge here was real: panjiri needed to be understood before it could be desired. Every setup was designed with that in mind, and the work proved that creative direction and brand strategy aren't separate disciplines. On a project like this, they're the same thing.