Company cooking competition fosters camaraderie, well-being

A home-cooking challenge to promote healthy eating and build camaraderie among staff was not a hard sell for Graham Builders President Evan Fujimoto.

“It just kind of grew out of how, in this company, there’s a lot of us that just love eating,” he said.

Most people in a corporate work environment will agree that company- or consultant-led team-building exercises are lame.

Not this one.

“I was super-excited when Evan came to all of us with this great idea,” said Renee Lee, the office manager who wound up winning the challenge. Everyone in the 10-member office staff is a foodie, she said, and it gave the team a chance to bond over talk of food.

“We all love to eat and try new things,” she said. “We shared our photos.”

Told that she won, “I was actually really surprised, because everyone here can cook. I was shocked,” Lee said.

Each Wednesday during the challenge, the staff, plus two former employees, posted a photo of a home-cooked meal they made during the past week. Everyone cast one vote for the best-looking dish — it could not be their own, however — with the highest vote-getters announced monthly.

Some of the weeks were themed, such as vegetable (not necessarily vegetarian) and barbecue weeks. Dishes could be anything an employee, their spouse or family member made, he said.

“All the dishes were really fascinating, from a purely anthropological point of view,” Fujimoto said. “Everything’s so different, what we all eat.”

He also learned that “people cook really well at home.” The more competitive foodies took extra care in plating their dishes for picture-taking, he noted.

Of course, the mission wasn’t really about anyone winning anything, Fujimoto said. What he really wanted was to celebrate healthy eating at home and family culinary heritage with recipes passed down through generations.

“Our staff is so into this,” Fujimoto said. “We see Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, all kinds of dishes. It’s everyday home cooking.”

Lee was the first-place winner, architectural designer Khresmar Dumas took second place and Jada Santos, a former sales and marketing manger, took third.

All participants received a specialty food item such as Korean noodles or cheese, while Lee also received a bottle of wine as her prize.

Fujimoto said Graham Builders’ office is a good size for such an exercise.

“If you have a big company I would break (the competition) into groups of say, 10 or 12 people,” he advised.

The four-week contest was fun for the company, but Fujimoto doesn’t want it to get old and tedious, so “we might do this a couple or three times a year.”

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