Chopped is available for streaming on Disney+ Canada and I’m here for it. Even though most of us would rather eat a mystery basket of sweet breads, tarragon, cotton candy, and lima beans than give someone difficult feedback. Chopped, where culinary dreams go to die spectacular deaths, is full of excellent practices for giving and receiving feedback. Let’s explore what Chopped can teach us about feedback in our work and life.

The Chopped Formula

For those who haven’t binged this masterpiece of controlled chaos, Chopped is the cooking competition where four chefs face off in a series of elimination rounds. Here’s the beautiful simplicity: each round, contestants receive a mystery basket containing four random ingredients (I’ve literally watched participants improvise really tasty dishes with ice cream cones, flank steak, Saskatoon berries, and marzipan) and must create a tasty dish that delights three judges.

After each round, one chef gets “chopped” (eliminated), and the survivors move on to the next round until only one remains.

What makes Chopped one of my favourite cooking shows isn’t just the bizarre ingredient combinations or the ticking clock. High quality feedback is central to the experience. The judges are teaching, coaching, and sometimes gently (or not so gently) crushing dreams with their words. Every critique is a masterclass in performance evaluation, delivered with the precision of perfectly plated dish.

Five ingredients of Chopped feedback

Watch a few episodes and you’ll notice the show has created an excellent and replicable framework for delivering, and hearing, feedback:

Clear criteria (and communication)

The judges evaluate every dish on three specific dimensions: taste, presentation, and creativity. Compliments like “good job” or advice like “needs improvement” are as scare as recipes in the Chopped kitchen. A contestant knows exactly why their deconstructed strawberry tart fish taco failed; maybe the fish was overcooked, the presentation was elegant and colourful, or they played it too safe with conventional flavors.

This clarity eliminates guesswork that plagues most workplace feedback. When someone knows they’re being evaluated on specific, measurable criteria, they can do something about it.

Timely

The judges taste dishes pretty much right after they’re finished. There’s no waiting for the quarterly review or the “let’s circle back next week” conversation. The feedback happens immediately after the performance, when the experience is fresh and the learning can stick, even (or especially) when the feedback is hard.

Feedback in the moment is also known as “anytime feedback” – it’s the practice of giving and receiving feedback on an ongoing basis, outside of formal performance reviews. It allows for spontaneous recognition, suggestions, or critiques to be shared at the point of impact, fostering a culture of continuous communication and improvement.

Compare this to most workplaces, where feedback travels slower than a the time it takes to perfectly cook risotto. By the time you hear about that presentation you bombed three months ago, you’ve already forgotten how you presented the data, let alone how you made your audience feel.

Concrete and calibrated

Chopped judges don’t traffic in abstractions. They don’t say, “there need to be more alignment with our core values”. Instead, they point to specific, observable outcomes: “The chicken is dry” raw or “I can’t taste the ice cream cone in this crust” or “I can’t identify half these ingredients under all that garnish”.

Everyone can see the dish. Everyone can taste it. The feedback is grounded in shared, tangible evidence rather than general comments about behaviour or hyperboles about someone doing “an awesome job”.

Disagreements about the quality of the dishes are discussed and calibrated by the panel of judges, which reflects how Chopped exercises a best practice for performance evaluations; to mitigate bias, performance decisions are evaluate through diverse lenses, such as culture, experience, and gender.

Radical candor

Judge Vikram Vij will say straight to contestants’ faces that they forgot to trim fat from their steak and that their potatoes are undercooked (or raw). The feedback is direct, honest, and sometimes brutal—but it’s delivered with respect and genuine desire to help the chef improve.

Chopped highlights radical candor, which is Kim Scott’s formula for delivering feedback that combines specific and sincere praise and kind and clear criticism.

This directness, while occasionally cringe-worthy, serves everyone better than the corporate dance of passive-aggressive hints and coded language. When someone tells you exactly what’s wrong, you can actually fix it.

Learning-centric

One of the show’s reflection tactics is for producers, during the exit interview, to ask contestants what they learned from the experience (learning happens every day when we reflect on our experiences). This simple question transforms defeat into development. Instead of wallowing in failure, contestants are immediately prompted to extract lessons and insights for future growth in their culinary careers.

Chop your community (in a good way)

So how do you import this reality TV wisdom into your classroom, workplace, or neighbourhood? Here are two practical approaches that won’t require anyone to cook with bread fruits, strawberry tarts, or any other mystery ingredients:

Embrace feedback in the flow of worklife

Stop waiting for perfect timing to give feedback. Create systems for real-time input, just like those judges tasting dishes fresh from the pan.

Try crowdsourced feedback tools during presentations or meetings. Use quick digital surveys after project milestones. Set up “feedback stations” where team members can give immediate input on work products. The goal is to shrink the gap between performance and feedback until it’s practically nonexistent.

I once worked with a university professor who ended every class with a simple question: “What’s one thing that worked well today, and one thing we should adjust for next time?” Students wrote feedback on a digital whiteboard (pretty cool in 2009!). The professor calibrated the next class based on real-time feedback, and students felt heard and valued.

Concreteness tells the story

Don’t just tell people they need to “communicate better” or “show more leadership”. Pull out specific examples; the actual work product, the email that caused confusion, the meeting moment that exemplified the issue is the thing on which to focus feedback, not the generalities. Make your feedback as concrete as pointing to an overcooked piece of salmon.

Multiplicity

Chopped uses three judges precisely because perspective matters. They don’t always agree, and that’s the point. The tension between different viewpoints creates richer feedback and better outcomes.

Build multiple perspectives into your feedback processes. Don’t rely on just one friend or supervisor’s opinion. Get input from peers, direct reports, customers, neighbours, and/or students. Create structured ways for different stakeholders to share their experiences and observations.

Maybe the judges won’t reach consensus, which is very valuable information too. When feedback varies widely, it often reveals important contextual factors or highlights areas that need more attention and development.

Courage is the secret ingredient

Here’s what Chopped really teaches us about feedback: it requires courage from everyone involved. The judges have courage to be direct and honest. The contestants have courage to receive criticism and learn from it. The whole system works because everyone commits to the process, even when it’s uncomfortable.

The best learning happens when we get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Most feedback fails not because people lack technique, but because they lack courage. We soften our messages until they’re meaningless (ruinous empathy in the Radical Candor parlance). We delay difficult conversations until they’re meaningless. We avoid specifics because they might hurt feelings or make thing too combative.

Real feedback – the kind that actually helps people grow – requires the courage to be clear, immediate, concrete, direct, and learning-focused. It requires the courage to care more about someone’s development than your own comfort.

So the next time you need to give feedback, channel your inner Chopped judge (or Top Chef, whatever). Be clear about your criteria. Be immediate in your timing. Be concrete in your examples. Be direct in your delivery. And always, always ask: “What did you learn?”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a sudden craving for some perfectly cooked Mini-Wheats breaded marzipan chicken wings.