March 28, 2014 | 2 minute read

Workplaces across the country are in the midst of March Madness basketball pools. Here at AICR, we’re cooking up brackets.

For our March Madness, we’re asking food lovers and cooks to vote for our 500^th Health-e-Recipe. Lauren, our Human Resource Director, talks about turning these brackets into an interactive workplace event for one way to put cancer-preventive research into action.

For our Recipe March Madness event, we started with this week’s Elite 8. The goal was to include everyone at AICR, having staff prepare the recipes and host a tasting potluck. It’s a simple and quick event that can encourage staff to try something healthier than what they may be used to eating.

For anyone who wants to host something like this in your workplace, here’s what I found worked well here:

– Look for the winning recipes on our Recipe March Madness page.

– Pick some staff volunteers to help, print out the recipes in advance for everyone

– have a helper (intern?) purchase the recipe ingredients for the recipes

– You want to serve and invite everyone to taste!

– We set up a voting station so staff can pick their favorites right on the spot.

– Post the results along with the recipes on your intranet or share through email

Don’t have time to do something in the next few weeks? You can host a healthy potluck any time of year. Pick a secret ingredient like in Iron Chef, make it an international theme to coincide with the World Cup in June or come up with another creative theme. Our healthy recipes are always available in AICR’s Test Kitchen and the Health-e-Recipe page.

Make the event interactive by having staff vote on their favorites, either overall or with themed categories like Most Original or Best Presentation. We’ve given out Golden Spatulas, healthy cooking magazines and aprons as prizes.

You can sign up to receive our weekly Health-e-Recipes and other publications, especially Health@Work, to get more ideas on how you can host healthy events in your workplace.

Already doing something healthy at your workplace? We’d love to hear about it.