Corporate Team-Building Cooking Activities
Looking for a unique team-building event for your Silicon Valley corporate group or company?
Inspire team communication, collaboration, and camaraderie with cooking!
A convivial competition. A culinary challenge. (Elmo says this intro was brought to you today by the letter C.)
It’s corporate teambuilding, à la Iron Chef!
This ain’t no ropes course, paintball game, or cocktail party — although Tony would be more than happy to talk to you about that last one.
I mean, no one’s knocking those other team-building ideas either.
Nor the cocktails. Because you could be thirsty after all that slicing and dicing. Not to mention it might help get those culinary creative juices flowing.
But definitely don your battle apron because Tony’s Iron-Chef-style team kitchen contest has some distinct advantages.
These apart from fostering employee retention, boosting morale, and increasing productivity, which we all know a day out of the office does, not just a bit ironically:
- Furthers real connection and community among team members. Because it’s teams, not just individual go-kart drivers.
- Levels the playing field. Everyone’s equal: mid-level-bosses and higher-up-bigwigs, supervisors and subordinates, programmers and project managers. Doesn’t matter what you know how to do at work…
- …because this has nothing to do with work. Thank goodness!
- It’s friendly competition but not cut-throat rivalry. Only things that need cutting here are ingredients.
- It’s actually fun. It may be a little awkward at first, but team members get into it pretty quickly. And almost all participants truly enjoy it. Besides, a wayward flying carrot slice doesn’t sting like a paintball.
Group Culinary Competition
Tony explains that culinary teambuilding challenges are an extension of the corporate catering Tony Caters provides. And — no surprise — are wildly well received by the groups who book them.
Here’s how a typical event might go:
To get that culinary creativity going and not to be hungry during the team challenge (Oh, the horror!), you and your guests arrive to start munching goodies from a prepared cheese board or other appetizers, and get a drink from the bar.
As you look around the room, you see identical cooking stations, as many as are needed to accommodate teams of about 6 to 8 max per station. Spoons, spatulas, knives, cutting boards, whisks, mixing bowls, gloves, and other basic kitchen tools top the tables.
At one end of the room you spy two central pantries. One houses a variety of ingredients — sun-dried tomatoes, fruits, produce, cheeses, vinegars, proteins, and all sorts of other potential flavorful additions — while the other stores extra specialty equipment that needs to be shared across the teams, such as cassette stoves, sauté pans, specialty hand tools, and the like.
I'm already warm to the idea of a team-building cooking challenge.
Tony’s favorite model is that the teams go head-to-head in an appetizer-building contest.
In this Clash of the Canapés, your team can pick from either focaccia crackers or gluten-free tostada rounds, and over the next 45 minutes build the perfect hors d’oeuvre.
A representative from your team then presents a garnished platter for judges’ consideration. You also need to build reinforcements so that your colleagues can peruse your station during judging to try your creation. And yes, you get to taste theirs too.
Judges award points for technique, taste and presentation (visual and story). They then crown the winner.
As Tony’s main contact for the event, you can decide whether the winning team receives an actual gift or just bragging rights.
But it doesn’t seem to matter much. Tony says it’s overwhelming how excited the teams are to compete, show off their skills and flavor-combination techniques, and then to actually present.
Often inside jokes, department names, and product names make it into the presentations, which always gets a big rise out of the crowd. It is usually a lot of fun to barter and negotiate for access to shared equipment or pantry items, too.
Tony normally emcees the event and is often head judge. But that’s up to you.
A tourney sounds terrific!
Or Cooking Party. Or Cooking Classes.
Although friendly competition is often a good thing to cultivate, maybe your corporate group doesn’t need more competition.
So change it up a bit and make it a cooking party instead. Or a cooking class.
The team-building element is still, well, baked in.
Culinary team challenge, large-group cooking classes, or cooking party for a couple hundred, Tony can make it happen at your place or at a separate venue in San Francisco, San Jose, or pretty much anywhere around the Bay area.
Let's get cookin'!
