What if, instead of planning a company event during a tight schedule of conflicting personal events and celebrations over the winter break, your organization’s celebrations were focused on dates of meaning for the organization? 

Instead, think of a meaningful cadence for YOUR organization to come together and create memories. Rethink what coming together means.

How do you know you are in the right place, with the right people, at the right moment?  You can just feel it!  We had that experience as part of a Seattle Creates agenda of amazing artists living in the intersections of design, architecture, culinary arts, and passionate engagement with our living and integrated world.  A Matter of Taste opened a deep design-thinking agenda that challenged ideas of space, experience, emotion, and engagement across the community of those who envision.

A sense of place is a critical part of human existence, a feeling of home, relationships and connections that lays foundations for new learning and pride in performance.  Going specifically local with our ingredient choices and experience partners embeds community into our workshops and events.  We believe that collaborating better requires real experiences and real relationships to make positive memories that connect us.

We’re proud to be able to feature a wide variety of foods, tastes, and flavors in our public workshops and events- read on for our shortlist of experience partners and local artisans!

Taste is personal, specific, and informed not just by how your mouth works but also by how your life has informed how you experience flavor.  The unique circumstances of your existence on this planet have guided how much you enjoy hot chocolate, or pasta with marinara, or a spicy iced chai.

But there are things to learn and apply when you taste specific flavors or foods that can give you insight to WHY your mouth does what it does, and WHY your brain makes the associations that it does. Different types of acids do different things to the foods we eat.  Different steps in chocolate making impact exactly what texture, taste, and lingering flavors we can expect from a lovely piece of regional artisanal chocolate made by a local maker from plants grown in specific climates.

We believe in sharing joy! In the past month, our team has worked with three different teams to do essentially that, share joy. Joy of discovery, joy of connection, joy of communication, joy of shared achievement, that’s what we’re actually doing. It’s not the vocabulary of the business world to put it that way, but that joy, earned that way, unlocks a team to resilience in good times, bad times, and times so turbulent they defy categorization.

It’s intuitive to a certain extent; when we are happy we get more done.  Digging deeper though, relationships formed in good times by definition share good memories.  That's the foundation for future collaboration and trust, empowering creativity and innovation. It’s a pretty direct route.  Maintaining the energy from joy takes work and opportunities- we provide those opportunities for teams.

“I thought umami only came from meat!”  In one of our workshops on umami, we witnessed a vegetarian tasting her way into the umami joy that can be found in so many vegetables and vegetarian dishes.