Cooking schools, guided tastings, workshops: a corporate event focused on cooking and taste can be an important team building and sharing opportunity.
Storytelling is an overused term (often inappropriately), but communicating through a story is often the best way to convey messages and create awareness. In my career, I have organized corporate events for important companies. Taste becomes a vehicle for growth, exchange, and identity affirmation. A company can make great products and establish its reputation on them: by sharing its story, a company can communicate something big.
Every project I have overseen started from different needs. From the launch of a new product, as in the case of Ferrero Ferrero S.p.A. (no relation, by the way!), to proposing a new use for everyday ingredients, as I did for Sparea. All my corporate event projects have taste and tasting as the central experience, without ever forgetting sustainability and health – my fundamental principles.
Ferrero
For Expo 2015, I collaborated with Ferrero to create a show in which we shared the final stages of designing a new product with the audience.
Which flavours accompany us throughout our lives? Those we discover in childhood, like the after-school snack. In the Italy of my childhood: crisp bread, creamy butter, and jam made from real fruit.
Ferrero gave me the opportunity to prepare a snack that respected those flavours. During an Expo 2015 event, in collaboration with the company’s pastry chefs, those three simple ingredients were transformed into an old-fashioned mid-afternoon snack that both honoured and updated them. The audience chose the final version, which then went into production for the Italian market. The secret of its success? The three pillars that support my culinary philosophy: sustainability, health, and taste.
Sparea
Every Italian household considers mineral water a kitchen essential, which means it risks going unnoticed. With Sparea, we managed to make mineral water less invisible, turning it into the protagonist in the kitchen.
What we don’t notice is what we always have right under our nose. Starting from this reflection, Sparea involved me in the planning of a corporate event to bring their water out of that supporting role.
The idea of turning it into a star in the kitchen showed everyone how many roles mineral water can play in cooking.
The quest for flavour takes in all those ingredients that might seem less important. But a good mineral water contributes to the final result more than you might expect.
Flavour is also, and above all, made of details – and everyone’s contribution counts. In my corporate events, even those who usually work in the shadows can step into a leading role, exactly like the most ‘invisible’ ingredients.
Fiat
The inauguration of the new Jeep Showroom of the Fiat Astra dealership in Arona, on Lake Maggiore, a guided tasting in search of flavour and…
After making a careful selection of local products, I organized a guided tasting at the Fiat Astra dealership in Arona, for the inauguration of the new Jeep Showroom.
Flavour ignites our memories: it does so by recollecting sensations and emotions related to taste, in an adventure that involves each of our five senses.
That evening, we were accompanied by a range of textures and flavours: every taste brought the memory of an event or a person to our minds. Through the pleasure of taste, in the healthy and sustainable way that I like, we brought the company values back to the surface. Flavour becomes an ambassador for the company’s values, completing a circle that moves backwards in time, to revisit our past, and forwards to the challenges we will take on tomorrow.
Banca d’Alba
Flavour makes teamwork tastier. For Banca d’Alba I prepared a game: the company employees were divided into teams and had to cook together.
In the past, there was a peasant custom that involved the whole family: the traditional art of home preserving.
This was real teamwork, where everyone had a small task that contributed to the final result.
Starting from this memory, with Banca d’Alba, I organized a game: divided into teams, the participants tried their hands at preparing first a preserve and gradually other dishes.
Like a mirror, cooking reflects the teamwork that a company requires on a daily basis. And it shows how much the flavour we produce can change, when you share it with conviction and passion.