Program helps employers build connections, community, and employee engagement while coworkers have fun honing their home-cooking skills with innovative spices and virtual cooking classes

July 23, 2020, SPOKANE, WA – Spiceology, Inc., the fastest-growing privately held spice company in America, today announced partnerships with Pixlee and Loop Commerce, a Synchrony solution, on a “Coworkers Connecting Through Cooking” initiative for employers looking for innovative and fun ways to re-energize and deepen connections with their employees. The initiative pulls employees together, virtually, around cooking at home, and includes guided access to engaging, live-streamed cooking classes, enabling coworkers to share their culinary adventures digitally with their colleagues.

“Employers are struggling to find ways to foster collaboration and camaraderie among their employees when it’s simply not safe to gather together,” said Chip Overstreet, CEO of Spiceology. “We’re turning what can be a mundane experience of preparing your meals into an opportunity to socialize, connect and share passion for food with coworkers. Employees can experiment with flavor together, learn more about each other through food, and just enjoy the communal experience that home cooking provides.”

With “Coworkers Connecting Through Cooking,” each employee selects a variety set of Spiceology’s innovative spice blends using GiftNow®, the Gift Experience Management™ solution from Loop Commerce®. Spiceology chefs provide online cooking seminars customized for each organization that teach employees some easy ways to use their new spice blends to liven up their meals and have fun experimenting in the kitchen. Pixlee provides a private digital channel, code-named “Quarantine Kitchen,” for each company’s employees to share recipes, photos and videos amongst themselves to help build lasting connections, well past the end of the cooking event.

Lightbend is a global software company headquartered in San Francisco that participated in one of the first “Coworkers Connecting Through Cooking” team events. “Like most every tech company in the world, we now have 100% of our employees working from home,” said Sushila Sahay, executive vice president at Lightbend, Inc. “While we spend plenty of time together on Zoom calls, we are missing the bonding opportunities that used to happen over lunch, hanging out in the corporate kitchen, and in the many restaurants we’ve visited together around the world. “Coworkers Connecting Through Cooking” gives us a way for employees to engage in a unique, fun format, and helps us drive community in this new, disconnected workplace.”

“Employers understand the value of relaxing and enjoying a meal together—we used to do it every day before COVID,” said Bryan Wargo, COO of Pixlee. “At Pixlee, early on in the pandemic, we set up a ‘Quarantine Kitchen’ digital channel and employees started sharing recipes and photos, and it became a very fun and engaging way for employees to interact and connect in different ways. Personally, I’m a wannabe chef; I introduced Spiceology to the company over a year ago, and we’re very excited about taking this concept out to employers and employees everywhere.”

The “Coworkers Connecting Through Cooking” initiative is comprised of three parts:

• The GiftNow Gift Experience Management solution that enables companies to take an enterprise approach to managing gifting for customers, partners, and employees.
• Pixlee’s photo sharing application, traditionally focused on curation for marketing channels, offers companies a dedicated, private photo sharing channel for employees to post and comment on creations they're making in their kitchens.
• Spiceology’s unique, innovative gift set blends are offered at wholesale prices, and the company also holds live streaming cooking classes for companies to help their employees have some fun together while doing what they're already doing – cooking more at home with their families.

“One of the biggest challenges of working from home is the lack of personal engagement that came with being in the office sharing meals and meetups with our colleagues,” said John Grech, head of retail partnerships at Loop Commerce. “Our GiftNow solution is a digital gifting program that lets employers say ‘thank you’ to their employees with the practical gift of learning to cook a delicious meal while also creating connective experiences for virtual engagement and team building.”

“We chose to highlight Spiceology’s “Love is Love” collection for our employees because it supports Lightbend’s commitment to diversity & inclusion through generous donations to food banks and pantries around the country,” continued Sahay. “The live streaming cooking class created a fun new way for our employees to gather and interact, doing something completely different together, and Spiceology Chef Tony walked us through the creation of amazing homemade dumplings, which happen to be the favorite dish of our CEO.”

Through Spiceology’s partnership with international shipping provider FlavorCloud, coworkers in over 200 countries can get their spices hassle free with duties and taxes handled seamlessly.

For more information on Spiceology, please visit Spiceology.com, or on Facebook and Instagram.

ABOUT PIXLEE

Pixlee is the leading user-generated content and influencer marketing platform providing brands the solution to their content needs. Pixlee supports well over 1,000 leading brands including Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, Alo Yoga, and Kenneth Cole. Witnessing the shift in how people interact with brands they love and the unexplored opportunity to connect social media with online shopping, Pixlee sets out to change the way marketers build relationships with today’s consumers and celebrates authentic brand storytelling at scale. Learn more about Pixlee at pixlee.com.

ABOUT LOOP COMMERCE

GiftNow, from Loop Commerce, a Synchrony solution, is a holistic Gift Experience Management (GXM) solution that takes the friction out of gifting. With GiftNow’s purpose-built GXM platform, gifters can send personalized digital gifts and gift cards in seconds and recipients can exchange or modify their items before they ship, benefiting gift givers, recipients, corporate gifting programs, and retailers. GiftNow is used by premium specialty and department retailers across the United States. For more information, please visit www.loopcommerce.com.

ABOUT SPICEOLOGY 

Founded in 2013, Spiceology is the fastest-growing privately owned spice company in America. The chef-owned and operated, one-stop spice shop offers over 300+ spices, blends, herbs, chiles, salts, confections, fruit & vegetable powders, and modernist cooking ingredients. Today, Spiceology brings flavor to leading restaurants, favorite bars and watering holes, as well as premier resorts, hotels and casinos throughout the U.S., operating out of a 30,000-square foot facility and warehouse based in Spokane, Washington. The brand is sold direct to consumers and chefs across the U.S. and Canada, with customers as far-reaching as Australia and Dubai. For more information or to place an order, visit www.spiceology.com or follow us on Facebook and Instagram. For recipe inspiration, visit here. 

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CONTACTS:

Cassidy Levine 
Havas Formula 
(619) 234-0345
spiceology@havasformula.com