The Stocked Pot
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Jellybeans, jicama and avocado: Those foods have nothing in common except they were recently secret ingredients in The Stocked Pot’s “Chopped” cooking challenge, and “whether it was dessert, a vegetable or the main dish, it turned out amazing,” said Andrew McMillan, CEO and president of the cooking school and culinary team-building company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The Stocked Pot offers several team-building events for groups as small as six or as large as 200, although the typical size is between 12 and 30 people, he said.
Cooking for a Cause, which the company launched in November, is popular for corporate events. Groups plan and prepare a meal not only for themselves, but also for a charity. After they make and eat their food, the meal they cooked is packaged and either delivered to a charity of their choosing, such as a food bank or a shelter, or The Stocked Pot will take it to Samaritan Ministries’ soup kitchen.
The “Chopped” and “Iron Chef” challenges, based on Food Network shows, are the most popular. Both make teams face off in timed competitions using secret ingredients to prepare a single course or a full meal. Stocked Pot executive chefs oversee the cooking to ensure safe food handling and often end up acting as judges.
www.funculinaryteambuilding.com
Breakout Games
Lexington, Kentucky
Lexington, Kentucky-based Breakout Games is part of the growing “escape room” craze that puts a group of people in a room where they must beat the clock to solve a mystery. Each of the Breakout Games’ 13 locations has four to seven rooms with themes such as “Kidnapping,” “Museum Heist” and “Casino Royale” that “give people a chance to live their favorite movie and be Sherlock Holmes instead of watching Sherlock Holmes,” said Bryce Anderson, Breakout Games co-founder.
The company is currently developing its seventh and eighth games, and nearly every location has at least four games. Casino Royale, for example, gives teams one hour to rescue a missing M16 agent, find an organized crime syndicate and escape with their lives.
The games are perfect for team building because each room has so many types of clues — maps, pictures, puzzles, high-tech and low-tech — that people with various skills and personality traits “all have wins,” Anderson said.
The games also level the playing field. The CEO doesn’t find the clue, but his assistant does; or the quiet guy cracks a puzzle and comes away the hero. The one-hour time limit also does away with the initial “cheesiness or awkwardness of most normal team-building” to help people come together more quickly, he said.
Shula’s Golf Club
Miami Lakes, Florida
Shula’s Golf Club in Miami Lakes, Florida, first offered night golf a few years ago for a group from Sweden. It was such a hit, Shula’s continued doing it for everyone from corporate CEOs to junior golfers and their parents, said Dave Gergely, golf sales and tournament coordinator.
“The neat thing is that it doesn’t favor great golfers, necessarily,” he said. “It’s fun for men, women and kids.”
Shula’s uses glow sticks and LED golf balls to set up a glow-in-the-dark course on its putting green. Night golf typically uses four holes, although staff will make the course larger for bigger groups so more people can play at once or include obstacles to make it more challenging.
Shula’s has done night golf for groups as small as 12 and as large as 40, although “we customize it to what the group wants,” Gergely said.
Shula’s also offers putting contests and short-game skills challenges as team-building options and has “starting new at golf” (SNAG) equipment — clubs with extra large faces, and Velcro or tennis balls — to introduce people to the game.
