Cooking with Conscience
Bespoke team-building activities that get real results – for your staff, for your company, and for your community.
- Bring your team together over delicious food
- Enhance productivity and improve teamwork
- Nourish Kiwi kids in need every time you cook
Cooking: A team-building experience everyone will enjoy
Food brings people together. Don’t you agree?
Cooking is a powerful team-building experience that encourages communication, collaboration, and connection. Preparing food has a way of drawing everyone in (even the wallflowers!) and breaking down barriers.
You’ll be amazed at how a Fearless Kitchen cooking experience will improve teamwork, communication, and collaboration within your organisation.
At the end of a cooking event, everyone feels included, connected, and accomplished. And they get to celebrate their achievements over the delicious food they created. Bon appetit!
The Fearless Kitchen feel-good factor
Our goal is to make sure every participant leaves our events feeling:
- A deep sense of belonging within your company
- Positive, uplifted, and confident in their abilities
- Connected with their colleagues and the wider community
- United by a sense of common purpose at work
We’re all about delicious food, fun challenges, and making people feel great, so you can build an engaged, motivated, loyal workforce.
Cook and give back
The Fearless Kitchen is not your average cooking business. We’re a social enterprise dedicated to providing quality food for all.
For every corporate cooking event you book, we provide an extraordinary cooking experience for Kiwi kids in need.
Your staff will love cooking together and supporting vulnerable Kiwi kids within their community. It’s a win-win.
Bespoke corporate cooking events
You’ll find no cookie-cutter classes, here because we design bespoke cooking experiences to suit your unique team culture.
Rather than telling you what menu you will cook and how you can fit into our plan, we take great care in customising your event to match your company and your team.
Here are just some of the cooking experiences your team might enjoy:
- Degustation dinner
- Mediterranean buffet
- ‘Around the world’ dinner
- Southeast Asian buffet
- Master of India
- Simply Saigon
- Mexican Fiesta
- 4th July party
- Modern Christmas
- Kiwi Spring
Cooking events for groups of all sizes
We can tailor our cooking experiences for groups of all sizes.
See below for our four main offerings: Bite, Micro, Premium, and Supreme.
Bite Size cooking at Ronald McDonald House
- Ideal for smaller teams with smaller budgets
- Mini packages with maximum flavour
- Two hours of cooking fun and community impact
Create a personalised team-building cooking event at Ronald McDonald House, where children from the house will be your judges and taste testers. We’re never quite sure who has smiled more after these events: the participants or the kids.
Enquire Now
Micro Cooking Experience
- Perfect for small to medium teams
- Customised menus and recipes
- Flexible locations
Bring your staff together for a fabulous team-building cooking experience with fresh and seasonal ingredients. Your event will provide a give-back experience for Kiwi kids in need. Your staff will love receiving wonderful photos and written impact statements after the event.
Premium Cooking Experience
- Superb for top-level corporate teams or entertaining clients
- Quality gourmet food and premium ingredients
- Give back to your community
Take team building to a whole new level with quality ingredients, stunning recipes, an inspiring raconteur to engage and motivate the crowd, and a spectacular finale of delicious gourmet food to share. Your event will also give Kiwi kids in need an amazing cooking experience, and you’ll have the option of sending staff along to assist as volunteers. Our premium experience brings people together and breaks down the barriers between corporates and communities.
Supreme Cooking Experience
- Brilliant for top clients, visiting dignitaries or global delegates
- Completely unique event built from scratch
- Gourmet food and wine matches
Looking for something special to delight your top clients, visiting delegates or top staff? Our supreme cooking experience is nothing short of exceptional. We create the entire event from scratch taking every detail into consideration. Your event will provide a cooking experience for Kiwi kids in need, which we will share with your clients or delegates as it unfolds.
Meet your head chef – Vanessa Baxter
Vanessa Baxter is a chef, award-winning cookbook writer, and Masterchef 2013 finalist with a degree in psychology. She believes food is the perfect medium for connection, creativity, communication, and understanding others. She has worked, lived and eaten all around the world, from heading a school in Vietnam to studying Italian in Siena to working as a private chef on Cape Cod.
She currently lives in Auckland with her two teenage sons, Chris and Morgan, sits on the Exec Committee of NZ Food Writers, and hosts The Fearless Kitchen podcast. Vanessa has no intention of ever slowing down and is an asset to corporates in New Zealand, where she creates delightful, memorable cooking events that create positive change.
"We kept The Fearless Kitchen challenge a secret from our teams as we were sure there would be push back. What eventuated was a high energy and fully engaging afternoon of cooking, connection and healthy competition which culminated in a fabulous Christmas spread. The vibe and collaboration surpassed expectations and staff rated it as one of the best events to date."
Charlotte Marshall
Director Charlton Realty, Harcourts
“Vanessa ran an engaging and energetic team build where our entire staff worked collaboratively to compete in a food challenge. The impact was clear on improved communication and connection through the school staff community.”
Simon Lamb
Headmaster, Kings College
Vanessa Baxter is just great! She provides a challenging, yet fun and inspiring team building event every time. We went back as it was so much fun the first time. The worry was, would it be too much of the same, but we should not have worried as Vanessa delivered a completely new challenge with new heights to scale! Well done!
Christien Winter
Director, Sheffield Auckland