Two chefs in linen aprons plating in a sunlit Franschhoek kitchen with mountains beyond

LAUNCHING 2026 · FRANSCHHOEK

NXT Chefs.

A chef school, a working food lab and the kitchen that feeds the campus — anchored in the food capital of South Africa.

587

Trained to date

96%

Graduate employment

4 of 10

Top SA restaurants nearby

Working food lab

Tenant operator

Franschhoek Hospitality Academy.

Run by Jeremy Davids, the Academy (est. 2017, NPO & PBO) has built the Change4Twenty programme — twenty students in the 2018 pilot, 587 trained to date, 96% graduate employment. Inside WeGroYou it becomes the chef school tenant.

Partner with NXT Chefs

Where graduates land

Mont Rochelle Hotel

Leeu Campus

La Petite Colombe

Protégé

Le Coin Français

Haute Cabriere

Black Elephant Vintners

Allée Bleue

Rickety Bridge

Sterrekopje Farm

Yama Sushi

Oku Asian Eatery

Documented placements from the 2025 cohort.

Facilities

Three rooms. One pipeline.

Hospitality-grade

Chef School

· Production kitchens
· Pastry & bakery suites
· Demo theatre with overhead camera

R&D

Food Lab

· Sous-vide, fermentation, dehydration
· Sensory tasting room
· Foodtech prototyping bench

Campus kitchen

The Canteen

· Feeds athletes, founders, guests
· Sport-nutrition meal plans
· Open kitchen, communal tables

Programmes

What gets taught.

Curriculum aligned with CATHSSETA and SA Chefs Association — the disciplines that produced the 96%.

Professional Cookery

Full-stack culinary training, from foundations to fine-dining service.

F&B Service Standards

Hospitality service at the level of the top-10 restaurants on our doorstep.

The World of Wine

Wine knowledge taught inside the Cape Winelands.

Barista & Coffee

Specialty coffee fundamentals to competition level.

Entrepreneurship

From line cook to founder — restaurant, product, brand.

Life Skills & Leadership

The Change4Twenty layer that has produced a 96% employment rate.

One body, many organs

How NXT Chefs interfaces with the campus.

↔ Sportif

Plate-level performance science. Daily sport-nutrition meals tuned to training load.

↔ Rangers

Field-ready meal kits for trail days. Provisioning for overnight expeditions.

↔ Ventures

Founders in food, drink and nutrition use the lab as their R&D bench.

↔ Campus

Chef school cohorts cook for the canteen. The canteen is open to every tenant.

The brigade

The people behind the plate.

From cohort line-ups to mentor portraits to the working specialist kitchens — this is what the chef school looks like in practice.

Four chefs in whites lined up at a stainless-steel pass with plated dishes in a Franschhoek kitchen

Head chef in a black tunic standing under a hanging rack of copper pans

Sushi brigade in black uniforms behind their head chef in a dark kitchen

Reference imagery from partner kitchens and culinary academies. WeGroYou-specific shoots in production.

Partner pitch deck

The chef school deck plugs in here.

We're producing the partner pitch deck in the NXT360 visual language. It will live on this page as a downloadable .pptx.

Submit an LOI See the financial model

NXT Chefs · Partner Pitch Deck

Generated with the NXT360 visual suite.

Download .pptx — soon

Tech & Media · horizontal layers

How this vertical plugs into the labs & the studio.

All tech & media labs

Tech tie-in

Food-Tech Lab

On-site Wegro OpenLab — fermentation, plant-protein and connected kitchens.

· Fermentation & sourdough lab
· Plant-protein R&D
· Kitchen IoT & traceability

Motion-picture output

Motion-Picture Studio

Captured by the on-campus studio (home of NXT Studio). Documentary unit, brand films and content built around this vertical's people and product.