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32 CATERING MAGAZINE  cateringmagazine.com
W
ine and food bring people together in unimaginable
ways,” says Maria Kopsidas, founder and owner of
Cookology in Sterling, Va. She should know. Kopsidas
has successfully tapped into food’s social power
through cooking classes and team-building exercises at her growing
business outside of Washington, D.C.
Opened in 2009 in a mall location, Cookology occupies 2,000
square feet of retail and kitchen space in Dulles Town Center. It
offers seven to 12 scheduled healthy cooking classes each week for
children and adults, as well as summer cooking camps and birthday
parties. It also conducts about 18 to 30 team-building events for
companies each month, including off-site, for groups of up to 250.
The popular team-building sessions are modeled after
“Chopped” on the Food Network, with employees pitted against
each other in a cooking competition. “Once we layout the rules and
safety guidelines, we’ll divide the client’s employees up into teams
and charge them with making one portion of a meal (meat, two sides
and a dessert),” explains Kopsidas. “The main ingredient, generally
a protein, is chosen prior to the event, and mystery ingredients
coincide with the selected protein. We then give each team a
bottle of wine to keep things interesting and let them go for it! Our
professional chefs who lead the events remain on hand to assist
throughout the process.”
COOKOLOGY
Competitors in a Cookology
team-building session enjoy their
meal (top) after preparing an entree
and dessert (above, opposite top and
opposite middle). Cookology sets the
table for the event (opposite middle),
providing attendees with everything
they need (opposite bottom).

2. A recent winning team, for example, chose chicken as their
protein and had Brussels sprouts as the mystery ingredient. The
meal they came up with was marinated grilled chicken, roasted
garlic Brussels sprouts and pasta primavera, with molten lava
cakes for dessert. “We always get excellent feedback and, as
a result, continue to have repeat customers,” says Kopsidas.
“ExxonMobil came once a month for several years until relocating
to Houston. In fact, they recently had a group of board supervi-
sors meet in the area and brought us back on board for that as
well. The feedback always yields glowing reviews and recurring
customers. It’s almost always named by the client as the favorite
of every corporate conference we’ve done.”
While sometimes the exercises take place in the Cookology
kitchen, “we can literally pull this off anywhere,” says Kopsidas.
Her team has conducted the exercise at clients’ offices and at
hotels. “Most offices don’t have kitchen facilities or stoves on-site,
so we bring in everything from refrigeration to hand sinks and
water coolers,” she says. “We’ll sometimes do menu suggestions
to accommodate for oven/baking/roasting limitations, but the only
real requirement is space.”
The team-building exercises are so popular that they resulted
in Cookology opening a catering division. Though just launched
within the last two years, catering now accounts for 20 to 25
percent of Cookology’s sales.
“Before each [team-building] event, we serve appetizers, and our
clients really liked our food, so they began requesting we do catered
lunches and other events for them,” says Kopsidas. “We started
small with some on-site luncheons, then we began to take on larger
projects, and it grew from there.”
The team-building sessions are such a hit, says Kopsidas,
because they encourage co-workers to communicate and interact
with each other in a fun, informal setting. “Our clients hope that in
some way they can make their teams closer and more cohesive,”
says Kopsidas. “People leave loving the fact that they’ve had a better
time with their colleagues than they could ever have imagined.”
 cookologyonline.com