Alumnus: Thando Manyoni

There’s no stopping Chef Thando Manyoni.

Thando Manyoni’s interest in food and cooking started while still at school.

“I made a red velvet cake and the positive reaction from my friends sparked my interest,” he says. “It was something about how what I had made brought the class together, and made everyone happy, made me fall in love with food.”

Manyoni (25) is now a private chef living in Wynberg, Cape Town, having achieved Capsicum Culinary Studio’s Advanced Professional Chef Programme and graduating in 2022.

“My journey started while I was still studying at Capsicum. I applied for, and was granted, a position at Dolce bakery in Observatory in Cape Town as part of my industry experience requirements. Even though I was based in at Capsicum’s Rosebank campus in Joburg at the time, I really wanted to be in the food media space or product development, and I needed to be in Cape Town to make that happen.”

Manyoni completed all her requirements two months after joining Dolce and then successfully applied to Woolworths to join its internship programme for product development.

After her internship ended, she moved back to Rosebank to complete her third year and it was during this time, that she was hired to work as an assistant chef on a cookbook shoot for Mokgadi Itsweng’s Veggelicious Cookbook.

Halfway through her final year Manyoni entered SABC2’s The Taste Master SA baking competition and made it all the way to the finals.

Immediately after the competition ended, Manyoni approached the production company and asked if they would consider hiring her to work on any of their other food-related shows, helping with anything from food styling to recipe writing.

A month later she relocated back to Cape Town to accept an accounts manager position where her position involved managing brand campaigns on a TV morning show, copywriting scripts, developing recipes, food styling and directing food videos for TV and social media as well as weekly appearances as the show’s resident chef and later producing and managing cooking competitions.

Three years later and Manyoni is now freelancing as a private chef in the Mother City but is also hard at work developing plans and ideas towards producing and hosting her own successful cooking show.