Team building became extremely popular in the past years. Teams have excursions, build kites, raw on the river, play music together, organize contests, write poems, hunt for hidden treasures, do useful charity work, play with dogs or go on a horseback riding trip. There are many different styles and one can find a team building project for all sorts of budgets and teams.
I enjoy all these, and it's a real creative process to come up with something new for teams, but the one I probably enjoyed the most is when we were cooking together. You may know that I love cooking and this way I can easily combine this passion with my work... :-))
How it works:
Teams are split into smaller groups or pairs (depending on the size of the team participating the programme). We select as many recipes as many smaller groups we have and estimate quatities in a way that the group should be able to eat what they finally put together. We try to pick recipes with the same number of ingredients and with the same complexity, time to prepare etc., so this part is really tough! We often involve a chef in this preparatory part.
We put together a "market" from all ingredients, and we add approximately 50% "extra", these are ingredients that are not needed this time.
We also prepare a huge table for each of the teams where they can all sit down plus a work station where they have a cooking stove and/or oven plus all the kitchen accessories they need for the cooking. (There are good rental facilities, where you can rent complete kitchens for these types of occasions.)
When teams arrive, we usually have a starting activity, something quick and funny, like BINGO, just to get them used to the situation. Then the party starts...
Round One
We give each small group the name of one of the foods. We try to select ones that are not very well-know, because a little uncertainty adds to the fun. Their task is to find out what ingredients would be necessary to cook that food. They have a little time to prepare for the "shopping", they have to find out which ingredients are needed for their food. Eg. we tell them that they will have 10 minutes to "buy" 10 ingredients. They may have a look at the market table while they put together their list.
Teams finally come to the "market" and ask for the ingredients on their list.
Round Two
This is the shocking part, because after they return to their table with the ingredients, they are told that they have to rotate clockwise and each team goes to a different workstation. :-))
The food names remain at the tables, therefore each group will get a different food in this round.
Then they get the list of ingredients for their food and we ask them to check how many of the ingredients they need are missing from the table (usually there is approximately a 50% match, the rest is missing).
Here I usually apply two versions to get the missing ingredients:
- for brave teams we have a chili tasting contest, they can ask for one ingredient if they taste a chili sauce, but the more ingredients they miss, the higher is the scoville factor of the sauce... so for example for one missing ingredient we start with a "light" sauce, one volunteer from each of the teams tastes it. Then they get the ingredients. For the next ingredient the bar is higher... It is usually great fun!
- the other option is to organize a quiz contest (I usually put together questions related to food and cooking) and they can have one ingredient for one correct answer.
Round Three
Here comes another shift. They again rotate clockwise and go to the next table. They leave the ingredients on the previous table and get a new set of ingredients at the new one.
Then we give them the recipe and they have 5 minutes to memorize it (obviously they cannot make photocopies or write it down)... Then we take away the recipe and they can start preparing the ingredients, but after a few minutes there is another rotation.
Round Four
In this round they have to tell the remaining steps of the recipe that they had memorised before to the group that comes to their station, because this group has to continue cooking...
I usually try to make sure that each group rotates at least once to each food, because this way all dishes will be the results of an overall group cooperation. So there could be more rotations after this step.
It is good if you have a chef invited to the programme. I usually tell him/her not to help much, but keep an eye on the food preparation and avoid bigger mistakes... :-))
(We want to have success in the end...)
This is a video about how it worked for a huge team (app. 250 people). It was really funny.
With the photos I enclosed I would like to join the #foodphotography contest organized by 
