This article will discuss food related team building ideas. We will do this by discussing a few basic ideas such as hosting a sports theme game, creating a food game, and painting a wall to work on team unity and camaraderie.
Sports theme
Host an active game in the group such as board games or group sports. Challenge the group to a food related game such as volleyball, corn-hole, or whatever they enjoy playing.
Something as simple as volleyball can turn into a fun team building activity. Holding a block or beach ball day can keep you all busy.
In addition to sports themed activities, your team can challenge you to eat a food related health scare or danger that is brought to you by the Food and Drug Administration.
For example, if your team has been avoiding hamburgers in fear of certain food poisoning, have them go up to you with a hamburger and ask you to taste and describe it.
Ask each team member to bring in some unappetizing dish such as a vegetable of indeterminate texture.
After a few failures, they will start to realize that a “trash burger” doesn’t taste that bad when compared to some fruit flavored squash.
Besides the thrill of the taste challenge, the players will bond with each other and have a good laugh at their teammate’s taste-test failures.
Food game
Another fun activity is creating a food game in order to have some food related fun with the team. Choose a food that each team member enjoys and have everyone involved in creating the meal.
Make a dinner menu and everyone gets a copy of the meal.
The teams will be charged with coming up with a recipe for each item on the menu. The challenge will be to think outside the box to incorporate more than the meal’s main ingredient.
In addition to the food related board game, have your team create a collage out of these recipes. Put this on the wall and each teammate has to be able to guess what each ingredient or combination of ingredients are.
For example, there are certain ingredients that are common in a recipe such as chicken. When it comes to the dinner menu, everyone will have to eat a certain percentage of each ingredient in order to complete the meal.
The game also allows you to practice your team cooking skills and make your teammates feel comfortable cooking for the group.
Remember to create some level of competition within the game. Each team member must try to complete the meal or portion size that is prescribed. If one of your teammates gets an ingredient wrong, they will lose points.
With the game and team project, you have team building while you get to experience some food-based team building activities.
Create a sports theme
Another fun food related game is to have each team member create their own team name. It can be an obscure description, such as having one person come up with the team name while their teammate write down the answer.
The name could be the team nickname, an abbreviated name such as The Meat Pits or The Meati-tees, or an alliterative name such as The Hot Sauce Balls.
Your team has a name and you have assigned your team member the title of captain. Each team member should get a drink and then write down their team captain’s drink on their team captain’s cup and finish off their drink.
Lastly, each team member should make a team name for their team out of the ingredients on the team captain’s drink. Each team member will have to read and describe the name of their team.
The challenge is to make your team name sound appetizing and the list should be a few words longer than the name of the team.
It may take some work on the part of each team member to come up with the best name for their team.
Sprint Archery
If you can’t commit to full team projects, there are plenty of fun team building activities to do. One activity that gets the creativity flowing is a sprint archery event.
This is great for groups of students who have special needs or limited upper body mobility.
It’s a great opportunity to build up your team and find out how you work with your teammates. The students are given a string bow and a target and must shoot a bullseye with it.
You can either have everyone involved in the event or a partner and all the students stand in one place.
Once the students have finished their arrow shooting session, they have to break off into teams and go into a team challenge.
They must first complete a creativity activity, such as drawing a logo or making a slogan. Then each team will go head to head against other teams to complete a food related task.
The challenge could be a relay where all five members run and then must throw a pot or bowl with a ladle while avoiding knocking over their opponent’s bowl.
Or they can be working as a team to create a map out of food and then identify the state that is on the map by using only the food items that were present on the map.
There are a lot of different ways to create the challenge so you can work as an individual or as a team to make it interesting for your team.
Why not try out the following food related games and team building activities? We think you’ll enjoy learning about these as much as your students will enjoy having fun.
