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Cuisine Service Cooks Up Some Camaraderie For Clients
By Mary K. Pratt, Special to the Boston Business Journal , 01/26/01–02/01/01

Julia Shanks is about to make a big leap. As the owner, chef and sole full-time employee of Interactive Cuisine, she has decided to rent her own commercial kitchen to accommodate her growing business..

Shanks founded Interactive Cuisine in 1997. Her revenue increased more than fourfold in the first three years as her promotional skills and word-of-mouth brought in customers. She added new features to her services. And, she is making a living doing something she loves.

Interactive Cuisine provides customized cooking demonstrations along with gourmet dinners for hosts and their guests. Shanks focused on private dinner parties for her first three years in business. But this past year, she added a new feature: corporate team-building through cooking.

It’s one small business catering to businesses of all sizes. And her approach to team-building is, by all accounts, unique.

Shanks’ own rise to chef and business-woman is equally unique. The 31-year-old Washington, D.C., native graduated from Hampshire College with a bachelor’s degree in aviation psychology. After a year with the Federal Aviation Administration, she applied for a job with Pan American Airlines in New York City. While waiting for takeout in a Chinese restaurant, Shanks saw an ad for the California Culinary Academy. She enrolled in January 1992 and graduated in April 1993..

Cooking felt right to Shanks, and for the next four years she worked in restaurants. After a year-and-a-half at Boston’s Biba restaurant, it was time for something a little different. "I knew I wanted to strike out on my own. I knew I didn’t want to be a restaurateur," she said.

After taking a business class at the Center for Women and Enterprise in Boston, Shanks formally set up shop. Her initial focus was private dinner parties. One of her first jobs was a party she had donated to a charity auction. Another client was a mentor helping her out. A third was someone who had seen her cooking demonstration at a local store.

Business was really starting to cook. Interactive Cuisine took in just $7,000 in 1997, but business doubled the next year. The company earned $40,000 in 1999 and about $50,000 in 2000.

Shanks charges a minimum of $65 per person with a minimum of $360 for an evening. The fee includes everything – food and cooking, tools and service – but not alcohol. For corporate training, she starts at $2000 for a half-day. Shanks added the team-building service in 2000, and by the end of the year had handled about a half-dozen such events.

"It’s supposed to be fun," she said. "The whole idea is to learn to work with your co-workers outside of business."

The idea of the corporate component came from a 1997 New York Times article about a company offering a similar service. "I just filed it away," Shanks said, but then clients started to ask her about the possibility of business outings. "All of a sudden, my phones were ringing."

David Feng, vice president of market development for Marlborough-based Be Free Inc., has used Interactive Cuisine on three occasions. He hired Shanks to help celebrate his wife’s birthday, host a customer event and run an employee team-building session.

That session featured about 20 employees preparing a menu to die for: potato gnocchi with smoked tomatoes, asparagus and sage; hazelnut and coriander crusted lamb or tuna with mango chutney and cool cucumber salad; pappadam shell; and chocolate bread pudding with Mexican Vanilla.

Feng said he saw employees working together in new ways. "This creates another environment where people develop working relationships."

Shanks works with two experienced facilitators, Carol Coutrier and Deborah Koehler, for team-building cooking sessions. "I think it’s a wonderful concept," said Coutrier, president of the Launching Pad & Co., a Sudbury-based consulting company that works with small businesses and startups.

Team-building exercises might include asking workers to form two teams – a lesson in self-organization, Coutrier said. Then, they might take up particular tasks with one team building on the other’s work. This develops communication and decision-making skills, she added.

Coutrier said cooking together helps workers build a common bond in an environment that’s not stressful or threatening. In fact, the fun that can surround an activity such as cooking helps workers get to know one another on a level that they often can’t in the office. That, in turn, builds empathy.

Although these skills should develop naturally among co-workers, it’s often difficult to foster in the office, said Gary Yates, president of Effective Environments in Healdsburg, Calif., and a member of the Society for Human Resource Management. "People are focused on specific jobs. The focus is on individual performance and not group performance," he said. "Team-building allows people to really buy into the mission of the company and the work group."

Ultimately, he explained, that gives people a sense of belonging and heightened job satisfaction, which, in turn, boosts a company’s productivity.

That’s why outside activities can be so crucial to fostering better working relationships, he said. The activities remove some of the office baggage – normal workflow issues, office alliances, time constraints – that can hinder those relationships. "There is no past, no history. You can focus on how we’re going to get this new thing done," Yates said.

Team-building sessions can be especially effective for small businesses, he added, because they can include more staff in the training and, therefore, have more of an impact throughout the company. "That’s a unique advantage," he said. "The impact is immediate."

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