AS the producer of some seriously steamy marketing videos, Michael Godshall, a founder of Project Dstllry in Brooklyn, is used to being provocative. But even he was apprehensive about turning up to a client meeting at the Ace Hotel in Chelsea insisting on a liquid lunch — and claiming it was all in the name of team building.


And it wasn’t the three-martini, “Mad Men”-era repast of yore. Mr. Godshall and his two company co-founders had brought with them bottles of something less tantalizing: Cooler Cleanse’s essential greens juice, a grassy blend featuring seven vegetables that Mr. Godshall described as “gnarly tasting.”


Never mind paintball retreats, the office happy hour or workshops that employ the “trust fall.” Group cleanses (generally one-to-five-day, all-liquid diets with anywhere from a half-dozen to as many as 150 employees taking part) are emerging as one of the latest ways to solidify corporate bonds, on both Seventh Avenue and Wall Street.


“It was a week when we were slammed, and we just needed to pull together as a community,” Mr. Godshall, 36, the company’s creative director, said of the office-wide three-day 1,200-calorie cleanse this year. “It was something we could do where we thought, ‘We’re all in this together.’ ”


What did the clients think? “They just laughed,” he said. (What they ate didn’t torture him enough to remember it, though he said his senses were so heightened during the cleanse, “I could smell roast chicken from four blocks away.”)


Eric Helms, who founded the four-year-old Cooler Cleanse company with the actress Salma Hayek, says office cleansers now make up 30 percent of his business, and in the last year he has hired three customer-service employees just to handle the details of them.


He said there has been a “huge increase in popularity” of cleansing with co-workers in the last year, which he credits to juice diets being more mainstream. “Everyone knows someone who’s done one, and they realize they’re a lot easier to do with colleagues during the workweek,” he said. “People want to indulge” — not sip celery — “on weekends.”


These days, prettily packaged potions frequently occupy the refrigerator (and the conversation) at financial companies. “I’ll send 25 cleanses down to the same brokerage firm on Wall Street," said Mr. Helms, who also founded Juice Generation in 1999.  “And anywhere the financial industry is big we get group orders: Chicago, Dallas, Houston.”


Last year Oprah Winfrey’s entire production staff in Chicago completed a three-day cleanse, he said, and the crew from “Here Comes the Boom,” a film Ms. Hayek recently shot in Boston, partook in the juice diet after being inspired by the actress.


A spokeswoman for Organic Avenue — whose orange tote bags became ubiquitous after one was spotted arriving for Gwyneth Paltrow in 2008; the actress also plugged the brand in 2010 on her lifestyle Web site, GOOP — said the company’s orders were now also about 30 percent office cleanses.


Recent six-juice-a-day-dieters include employees at Merrill Lynch and the Carlyle Group, she said. In May, Citigroup began offering BluePrintCleanse in some of its Manhattan cafeterias, a spokeswoman said. Restaurant Associates, which runs the cafeteria, declined to explain the decision.


The popularity of cleanses continues to rise, even as health experts seem dubious about the efficacy of some of these diets. “Your liver and kidneys can handle toxins just fine,” said Joan Salge Blake, a Boston University associate professor of nutrition, who has studied fad diets. “There’s no science to back up cleansing.”


About two-thirds of cleanse clients over all are women, but corporate cleanses “commonly skew toward men, especially traders, investment bankers and lawyers,” said Jina Wye, director of sales and marketing for BluePrintCleanse, founded in 2007 by two former Hudson Hotel bartenders looking to swap their poisons. (Mr. Helms said 90 percent of his male customers are part of groups.)


Ms. Wye said: “These Type-A men have an all-or-none perspective. If they’re going to commit, they do it whole hog.”  Most popular among male en masse cleansers: the Excavation cleanse, described on the Web site as “the most intense.”


Office cleanses are rarely corporate sponsored, subsidized or sanctioned. Several companies declined to allow employees to speak publicly about them because cleansing is a sensitive issue.