Food Sorted by Colour: Linda Lundgren for Hemköp

Linda Lundgren, a Swedish food stylist, once treated the supermarket aisle like a paintbox. For an advertising campaign for Hemköp—a Scandinavian grocery chain—she sorted ordinary foods by colour and built dense, monochrome collages that look half pantry and half abstract painting. Red beside red, yellow beside yellow, purple stacked until it becomes a single vibrating field: the pictures made grocery staples newly strange by refusing the usual mixed still-life.

The series traveled widely online around the turn of the 2010s because it is instantly readable. You do not need a long caption to understand the joke and the craft at once. These are products you could buy on an ordinary Thursday, arranged with the patience of a studio that treats ketchup labels and cabbage leaves as equal citizens of a colour family. Linda Lundgren’s name stuck to the work because the discipline is visible: this is not a random pile sorted in five minutes; it is commercial styling with an artist’s constraint.

Who Linda Lundgren is in this story

Linda Lundgren works in the discipline that sits between cooking and photography: food styling. The job is not simply to make food look tasty. It is to make food look intentional under lights, in a frame, for a brand’s voice. In the Hemköp colour series, that intention is systematic. Instead of plating a recipe, she inventories a palette. The “dish” is the colour itself.

That choice matters. Many food photographs flatter a single plated meal—steam, garnish, hero protein in the center. Lundgren’s collages flatter the category of food as material: packages, produce, powders, jars, and sweets. They remind viewers that commerce already sorts the world by shelf, brand, and marketing story. She re-sorts it by the blunt fact of hue. Credit belongs with her full name—Linda Lundgren—because colour-sorted food images have imitators, and precision of authorship keeps the campaign from dissolving into anonymous “internet collage.”

Hemköp and the supermarket as gallery

Hemköp is a familiar Scandinavian supermarket name. Using its products for a colour campaign does double work: it shows range (the store can fill a red world and a green world) and it turns shopping into spectacle. Advertising often hides the warehouse logic of retail—pallets, planograms, seasonal resets. Lundgren’s images make a friendlier version of that logic visible and playful. The message is less “buy this exact recipe tonight” than “look how much sensory life is already inside these aisles.”

Supermarket art has a long cousinhood with pop art and commercial still life, but the colour-block method feels especially of its moment: clean graphic impact that survives small phone screens and blog embeds. Each frame behaves like a poster before it behaves like a document. That is useful advertising and, separately, lasting curiosity content—the reason lifestyle sites kept circulating the set years after the campaign’s first flight.

How the colour collages work

The method sounds simple and is not. Sorting by colour forces hard editorial decisions that a mixed bouquet never demands:

• What counts as red? Tomato, chili packaging, strawberry jam, and a maroon label may sit together—or one may break the chord.
• Packages versus produce. Printed cardboard reflects light differently from wet fruit skins; mixing them needs careful placement so the field stays even.
• Shape rhythm. Circles of citrus, rectangles of boxes, and leafy edges keep the eye moving so the block does not become a flat wall.
• Gaps and density. Too sparse and it looks like a leftover pile; too tight and labels become noise.
• Secondary tints. A “yellow” panel still contains cream, gold, and lime-leaning outliers; the stylist decides how far the family stretches before it snaps.

Viewers often pick favorites by colour—red for intensity, yellow for sunniness, purple for surprise—because each panel has a different emotional temperature even though the technique is constant. That is the quiet sophistication of Linda Lundgren’s series: one rule, many moods. Comment threads that argue “yellow wins” or “purple is stunning” are really arguing about feeling, not about groceries.

Why colour-sorted food fascinates

Humans already use colour as a rough nutrition heuristic—greens for leaves, oranges for carotene-rich plants, reds for berries and tomatoes—but everyday plates are mixed. Seeing food forcibly segregated by hue does two things at once. It flatters the eye’s love of order, and it reveals how arbitrary our usual “meal” compositions are. A purple panel can hold cabbage, grapes, packaging, and sweets in one democracy of tint.

There is also comedy. Brownie mix, spice packets, and fresh produce sharing a red universe collapses the hierarchy between “cooking from scratch” and “opening a box.” In Lundgren’s frames, brand graphics become part of the pigment. Typography is just another shape in the mosaic. The campaign smiles at consumer culture without sneering at it—an important tone for a supermarket client and a reason the images feel generous rather than cynical.

Food styling lessons hiding in plain sight

Even if you never build a Hemköp-scale collage, the series teaches usable styling habits for home cooks, prop stylists, and anyone photographing a table:

1. Commit to a dominant. One strong colour story beats five competing accents.
2. Repeat forms. Echo circles or vertical labels to create rhythm.
3. Mind the edges. Corners and borders need as much intention as the center.
4. Let labels participate. In commercial work, packaging is not an apology; it can be composition.
5. Control shine. Mixed materials need light that flatters both matte produce and glossy plastic.
6. Edit ruthlessly. The nearly-right object is often worse than a gap; remove what breaks the chord.

A lighter home version works in twenty minutes: a fruit bowl in one colour family, a dessert plate of only yellow tones, a herb-and-vegetable tray that stays in greens. Constraint looks like authorship. That is the same principle Linda Lundgren scaled up for Hemköp, only with a full studio and a warehouse of SKUs behind her.

Between ad campaign and internet folklore

Once images like these leave the campaign context, they become folklore—reposted, cropped, debated in comment threads about which colour “wins.” That afterlife is part of why Linda Lundgren’s name stays attached to the project. The work is specific enough to credit and general enough to share. People argue about purple versus yellow; they rarely need a paragraph of theory to start looking.

It is worth keeping the credit clear. Colour-sorted food photography has cousins and copycats. This particular Hemköp series belongs to Linda Lundgren’s styling eye: Swedish supermarket goods, disciplined monochrome fields, and the patience to make abundance look designed rather than dumped. Naming her correctly keeps the curiosity piece honest.

Looking again at the grocery aisle

After seeing food sorted by colour, ordinary shopping changes slightly. You notice how many reds live on one shelf, how greens dominate the produce mist, how yellow hides in oils, pastas, and citrus. The campaign’s lasting trick is not that it invents new products. It invents a new way to see products you already know.

Try a miniature version once—one cutting board, one colour, a short timer. You will feel the same editorial friction Lundgren solved at scale: what belongs, what nearly belongs, and what breaks the spell. That friction is the art. The collage is only the proof that a Swedish food stylist named Linda Lundgren, working for Hemköp, turned aisle inventory into a rainbow you can almost taste.