Isdin Team Building MasterChef — Isdin

Isdin

Isdin Team Building MasterChef

Team Building · Masia d'Esplugues · 2018

MasterChef-format team building for the Isdin team, a Barcelona-based pharmaceutical dermocosmetics brand. Competitive cooking day with a professional jury at Masia d'Esplugues.

  • Isdin Team Building MasterChef event in Barcelona — Bacus Events production
  • Isdin Team Building MasterChef event in Barcelona — Bacus Events production
  • Isdin Team Building MasterChef event in Barcelona — Bacus Events production
  • Isdin Team Building MasterChef event in Barcelona — Bacus Events production
  • Isdin Team Building MasterChef event in Barcelona — Bacus Events production
  • Isdin Team Building MasterChef event in Barcelona — Bacus Events production
  • Isdin Team Building MasterChef event in Barcelona — Bacus Events production
  • Isdin Team Building MasterChef event in Barcelona — Bacus Events production
  • Isdin Team Building MasterChef event in Barcelona — Bacus Events production
  • Isdin Team Building MasterChef event in Barcelona — Bacus Events production
  • Isdin Team Building MasterChef event in Barcelona — Bacus Events production

The challenge

Break hierarchies without turning the day into an amusement park.

The Isdin team had done team buildings before. Olympics-style games, escape rooms, outdoor dynamics. They work for an afternoon and are forgotten within a week. The specific request was different: an activity that would generate real conversation between departments that need each other daily but never coincide, and that would do so without falling into zip-line choreography or physical challenges that exclude part of the workforce.

A tone restriction was added to this. Isdin is a company with a scientific culture. Any proposal had to respect that code: no infantilising sketches, no dynamic that felt designed for a different group than the one participating. The format had to sustain the conversation of a management committee that would also be in the room.

The challenge, stated without decoration, was to build an activity that worked as a relational accelerator while respecting the professional maturity of those experiencing it. Standard options did not serve. Cooking emerged as the hypothesis.

Bacus's response

Turn a professional kitchen into a laboratory of roles, pressure, and tangible results.

Bacus designed an activation inspired by the MasterChef format but recalibrated for a corporate environment. The concept avoids a literal copy of the television programme. What is transferred is the useful mechanism: short windows, imperfect briefing, assigned ingredients, a real jury, a dish evaluated at the end. What is discarded is the theatrical component, the shouting, and the competitive humiliation. The pressure is maintained. The caricature is eliminated.

The production is built around a kitchen equipped with five independent workstations. Each station receives a professional chef as mentor, a kit of partially shared ingredients, and a different creative brief. Teams are formed by deliberately mixing departments: each station brings together profiles that in day-to-day operations barely share a meeting. The criterion is not affinity. It is enforced complementarity.

The day's sequence is built in three movements. First: briefing and role allocation within the team — someone leads, someone manages the clock, someone executes. Second: cooking against the clock with limited technical assistance from the chef mentor. Third: plating, defending the dish before the jury, and cross-tasting between teams. Bacus coordinates the script, the rhythm between movements, production direction, and the curation of the jury so that each team receives useful feedback, not empty applause.

The experience

What starts as a joke about aprons ends with five dishes defended in earnest.

The day is experienced in three distinct emotional registers. The entry is humorous. Participants arrive with reservations, make jokes about who will burn the rice, hand out aprons as if putting on a costume. That phase lasts twenty minutes.

The second phase begins when the countdown starts. The attitude changes without needing to be pushed. Unofficial leadership emerges, those who stay calm surface, those who freeze are visible, those who improvise well stand out. Office hierarchies dissolve because in a kitchen with forty minutes left, different competences are in command. People look at each other differently.

The third phase is defending the dish. Each team presents its proposal to the jury and the rest of the group. It is not a talent competition. It is a public conversation about how work was done. People laugh, recognise themselves, feel slightly uncomfortable, applaud the rival. The final tasting takes place amid conversations that no longer resemble Monday morning coffee.

The result

A day that returned the team to itself and left a shared vocabulary for the months ahead.

The close is measured on two levels. Immediately, the day produces the effect the brief asked for: people from different departments talking about how they organised themselves under pressure, laughing at their own failures, comparing themselves with rivals who tomorrow will return to being corridor colleagues.

On the practical level, something more operational remains. The HR team integrates the format into its internal activation map. The reference to the kitchen appears in subsequent conversations whenever a project demands cross-functional profiles working against the clock. The team building stops being a day out and becomes a shared language.

Client
Isdin
Attendees
200
Venue
Masia d'Esplugues

Frequently asked questions · Isdin Team Building MasterChef

What readers ask after this case.

  • The difference lies in the competitive and evaluation device. A conventional cooking workshop distributes a shared recipe, all participants follow it at the same pace, and the result is uniform. The activity works as entertainment but generates no useful observation about how the team works. The corporate MasterChef format introduces different briefs per station, real time pressure, deliberate role assignment, and a jury that evaluates not only the dish but the team dynamic that produced it. Cooking stops being an end and becomes a pretext for observing leadership, time management, and decision-making under pressure.

  • The format works particularly well with mixed teams of between thirty and one hundred people who need cross-functional collaboration in their daily work but rarely practise it: marketing with regulatory, sales with production, newly formed project teams. Bacus configures stations in groups of six to eight people per team, allowing scaling between five and twelve simultaneous stations depending on group size. The format is inclusive physically, requires no prior cooking experience, and accommodates dietary restrictions through briefing adaptation per station. It is not the right option for groups below twenty people, where the competitive dynamic between teams loses tension.

  • The activation requires a space with a professionally equipped kitchen or the capacity to install technical stations with induction hobs, sufficient electrical supply, and adequate extraction. Bacus produces the format at professional culinary schools in Barcelona and at corporate venues with industrial kitchens. In spaces without a permanent kitchen, the technical team installs modular stations with professional induction equipment, mobile refrigeration, and full utensils. The minimum usable floor area is around four hundred square metres for groups of forty people, counting workstations, jury area, and final tasting zone. The venue choice conditions the day's rhythm and the final quality of the dish, so it is agreed at the first production meeting.

  • The translation happens through two channels. The first is the jury's structured feedback during the dish defence, which verbalises aloud what team dynamics were observed at each station: where time was lost, what leadership appeared, how unexpected situations were handled. That feedback functions as a professional mirror, not a gastronomic critique. The second channel is the subsequent conversation. The format leaves shared vocabulary between departments that the HR team can reactivate in follow-up workshops, cross-project evaluations, or leadership development sessions. The usefulness depends on that second channel being planned from the brief, not from the activity itself.

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