Why Food Is Your Secret Weapon at Every Team Event
I have been to a lot of corporate events. I have also catered a lot of them, which gives you a slightly different vantage point.
And I can tell you with reasonable confidence that the events people don't talk about afterwards are rarely the ones where the speaker ran over time, or the afternoon session lost the room, or the agenda was three items too ambitious.
They're the ones where the food was an afterthought.
You know the spread. Cling-wrapped sandwiches, slightly warm. A fruit platter that was passable at 9am but has been declining steadily ever since. Muffins that arrived in the box they were baked in, at a factory, last Thursday. Nobody says anything. But everybody notices.
Here's what I've come to think, after more than a decade of catering team events across Sydney: food at those events is not doing a neutral thing. It is either working for you, or against you. There isn't really a middle ground.
What food at team events is actually doing
A few years ago (2015 to be more precise), researchers at Cornell University found that groups who eat together perform measurably better on cooperative tasks than those who don't. Better coordination, higher cohesion, more willingness to work through problems collectively. The effect was consistent enough to be taken seriously.
Then in 2019 a study published in Psychological Science, tracking nearly 1,500 participants, found that people eating from shared plates cooperated significantly more and reached agreements faster than those eating individual portions. The effect held even between strangers.
I'll admit that when I first read about this, my instinct was to be politely sceptical. (It is, after all, exactly the kind of finding that catering companies like mine would very much like to be true.) But the mechanism makes sense when you look at it.
When you sit down to eat with people, or share from the same dish, something structurally interesting happens. You are simultaneously shoulder to shoulder with the people beside you, and face to face with the people across the table. Shoulder to shoulder tends to produce ease: the kind of comfortable, low-pressure connection that happens when two people are doing something together without the obligation to perform at each other. Face to face produces something different: directness, the particular intimacy of being seen.
A shared table creates both at once.
Which might be why eating together does something a two-hour workshop, a team-building exercise, or a very sincere keynote speaker often doesn't. The food removes the performance pressure. You're ostensibly there to eat. Everything else happens around it, through it, because of it.
The signal your food sends before anyone takes a bite
There is also this: the food at your team event communicates something before anyone has tasted it.
Food made properly, from scratch, with actual ingredients, signals something specific about how the day has been put together. It says this was worth doing well. The reverse is also true. Catering that is clearly a logistics problem someone solved at the last minute reads as exactly that, and the people sitting down to eat it understand the message immediately.
I am not making an argument for extravagance. A housemade blondie and a pot of good tea is not an extravagant thing. But the difference between a blondie made from butter and real chocolate and one defrosted from a commercial catering supply is not primarily a cost question. It's a question of whether anyone thought it mattered.
Your team will know which one they're eating.
What good catering for a team event actually looks like
The 2019 study finding has a practical implication that's worth comment: shared plates and platters aren't just a serving format. They're doing something to the room before anyone has said a word.
People who eat from a common plate coordinate their physical actions around it. They pass, they wait, they offer. And that small, unremarkable coordination primes them to coordinate in other ways. Which means the decision to serve shared grazing food at a team event is not purely an aesthetic one. It's a structural one.
Beyond format, the food needs to suit the shape of the event. Morning tea for a standing group is a different brief from a seated working lunch. Grazing food works socially in ways that individually plated portions don't: it gives people a reason to move, something to comment on, a reason to linger near someone they've been meaning to talk to for six months. It also needs to work for everyone at the table, dietary requirements included, without anyone having to flag themselves to a stranger holding a clipboard.
And it shouldn't try too hard. The best food at a corporate event is food people actually want to eat.
The part that doesn't appear on the menu
At Dinner on the Table, every corporate event we cater helps us cook for a family living with disability. It's not a seasonal campaign or a partnership arrangement. It's built into how we operate. Every meal we make for you means we're also making one for someone who needs it.
For some organisations, that's part of why they choose us. For others, it's the blondie. (Both are, genuinely, reasonable positions.)
But if your next team event can do something good beyond your own office, it seems worth mentioning.
What to do next
We offer corporate catering for team events across Sydney: from breakfast to morning teas, working lunches, dinner and everything in between. Everything is made fresh in our kitchen, with no preservatives and no ingredients you'd need to look up.
If you're planning an event and you'd like to talk through what that looks like, we'd love to hear from you.