There's a reason team building in hotel conference rooms rarely gets remembered six months later: it leaves nothing in anyone's hands. Cooking together, lighting an outdoor grill, planting a tree — those do. They're activities with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a tangible result the team can smell, taste, and — in the case of the tree — go back and visit years later. Near Bogotá, amid the landscape of Cundinamarca and the Tominé Reservoir, that kind of experience is less than two hours from the office.
Cooking as a team forces something that almost never happens at the office: dividing up real tasks, under real pressure, with a result everyone is about to eat. No hierarchy survives a cutting board and a fire that needs tending on time. The manager who's never chopped an onion and the analyst who turns out to be a natural at the grill suddenly land on the same level, and that reshuffles group dynamics in a way no motivational talk ever could. The grill especially has an almost ritual quality to it: fire demands patience, coordination, trusting that the person next to you won't let the meat burn while you're chopping chimichurri.
Then there's the setting. Pulling the team out of the city, putting them in front of the water or the hills, phones on airplane mode because signal is scarce — that's already half the work done before the first coals are even lit.
Not every team-cooking format suits every group. These are the ones that perform best in corporate experiences:
If cooking and grilling build instant camaraderie, planting a tree gives the day a meaning that outlasts the workday itself. It's the activity that turns a team building event into something the company can point to as part of its environmental commitment — and something every team member can later say: "I planted that tree, with my team, that day."
By the Tominé Reservoir, the team plants native trees as a symbolic close to the day — a simple way to leave something behind in a landscape worth caring for. It works particularly well as a complement to a cooking or grilling session, or as a standalone experience for teams looking for something more contemplative and less food-centered, but just as memorable.
These experiences work best with groups of 10 to 40 people: enough critical mass to form mixed teams, but not so many that the logistics of fire and knives become a problem. For larger teams, the usual solution is splitting into two shifts or two parallel activities (half cooking, half planting) that come together afterward for a shared lunch.
As for timing, a full day — departure from Bogotá, the activity, lunch with what was cooked, and the return — takes between six and eight hours, which makes it perfect as a single-day outing with no overnight stay required, though it can also be stretched into a weekend by combining it with other experiences in the Tominé area, like a sailing outing or an afternoon at a thermal spa.
What almost no corporate events provider offers is the exact combination of these three things — chef-guided cooking, outdoor grilling, and real tree planting — coordinated as a single experience, without your company having to piece together three separate vendors. If your team needs something different from another ballroom with buffet catering, write to us and we'll design the day together to fit your group size, your date, and what you want people still talking about the following Monday.