One of the most recent times That Food Guy popped up was last week with the story I was doing about Just Teddy and Teddy’s beautiful book, Petals from Paris. On getting the book, I checked the credits and found it had been published by That Food Guy.  

Really? I thought I knew our food publishers. I’d also just found out he was involved in food advertising and digital amplification as That Food Guy Group. 

I thought That Food Guy and I’d both be happier, at this time especially, meeting outside. So I’ve picked the pretty back garden of a local pub where the coffee is excellent and a glass of champagne available if needs be.   

He’s Dale Herbst. He’s That Food Guy, drinking pure water while I throw back coffees. I could do with that glass of champagne myself because I’ve left my phone, which is my camera, behind. I arrived here 20 minutes too early because I misread my watch somehow but it just wasn’t early enough to race back and get the phone. 

In complete contrast, Dale’s cool and calm, the tall and seemingly unhurried sort. This is the nice guy that’s cornering the food market. It seems like that. 

He’s cornered more food book publishing than I knew about as well. J’Something’s Something’s Cooking was his first, working with Quivertree Publications. Dale works with J’Something on his brand and the continuing story of engagements, like his recent TV series with David Higgs, My Kitchen Rules, a reality cooking programme, where they judged cooking teams for prizes, based on an Aussie show. 

Dale’s and J’Something’s business relationship goes back a relatively long way, given Dale’s surprisingly tender age. Back to J’Something’s own programme called Something’s Cooking. It was the title of his food book and Dale came in there too.

Not all Dale’s productions were food ones but Breakfast Express type shows call for food guests and J Something was beyond being just a celebrity chef by then. In any case, he has great TV watchability. So J and Dale go back to Dale’s TV production days and that’s probably where their food connection starts building. They both sort of fell into it.

J’s falling into it was just because he once posted a pic of something he’d made. He’d actually called the post Something’s Cooking. As the lead member of the super-successful music group, Mi Casa, he had a great following and, coming from a Portuguese family as Joao da Fonseca, he cooked pretty good and accessible stuff. 

Coming from a Portuguese family, J’s food is pretty good and accessible to us. (Photo: Quivertree Publications)

When Dale started getting TV production fatigue and taking stock of his life and directions, it was J’Something who called him about brand management. J was a marketing grad himself, before his Mi Casa days, so he knew who and what he wanted and was getting.

Dale took Honours from AFDA, the film, performance, entertainment, related business and tech institution. Though he’d once wanted to be an entertainment lawyer he found himself deep into TV production and productions. He worked almost everywhere, generally on the production and line production side. Line producers do all the stuff that keeps a production going, from the inspiration and creative production work to the business and bucks. Everything can and does change every day and they have to be on it and controlling it.

It tells me a lot about how capable this food guy is. It’s exciting work but can be just too exciting. However it’s the sort of job that can prepare you for any kind of exceptionally thorough work, like really good marketing, like publishing.

I lean back in my garden chair and marvel at Dale. I’ve had a film company. I’ve been in advertising and I produce books for a publisher. However, this guy is so focused, making use of every bit of what he’s done and what’s just happened, whipping them all up into one rising soufflé, That Food Guy Group. I could really envy him.

That Food Guy is Dale Herbst. (Photo: Supplied)

As a show producer, he’s also been used to finding sponsors, say food sponsors, at finding guests to appear, let’s say food guests, and this is essentially how he makes his company work. How he enjoys making it work is with new challenges, learning new things like finding out more about food from the classics, as we’ll see in a minute. And being enormously determined to find joy in his life everywhere. He even finds it when he’s dog-tired but realises that, because he’s doing such a worthwhile job, he’s actually happy.

I love it. My experiences at least taught me, as a now happy person myself, that happiness is a gift you seek out yourself. What I love more is that Dale has made food central to his business. 

More food publishing followed J’Something’s book. He worked with Sarah Graham as well as Chef Nti for their own publications. But he actually published a completely new one as That Food Guy Publishing.

I tried last year to find out about who had taken such extraordinarily good and clean pictures for a food book by a woman I’d not even heard of till then. It seemed to be a bit of a mystery at that stage. The woman in some of the pics and the cookery author turned out to be Naqiyah Mayat who’d been a blogger about her family recipes and was a “food, travel, fashion and lifestyle influencer”. Dale had a lot to do with those images. As he says, they were especially important as the pre-development of her debut book. “I am a huge fan of moody, contrasty and lifestyle food images – static images have their place but there is something powerful around seeing food being prepared,” says Dale.

Extraordinarily beautiful – just a finished paratha by Naqiyah Mayat. (Photo: That Food Guy Publishing & Curtis Gallon)

They were and are fabulous. Naqiyah Mayat’s book, Indian Recipes From My Home, has just won two World Gourmand Cookbook Awards, the first for Best Debut Cookbook and the second for Best Indian Cookbook. She is now a real food personality working with major sponsors, the sort of things Dale can manage so well. 

Dale and his publishing business strategist, Funeka Peppeta, worked on Somizi Mhlongo’s self-published foodbook, Dinner at Somizi’s, with a special flash on the cover for the local press, confirming I am not a chef. Dale worked on the actual content and look. This month it’s been nominated, selected from 1,558 entries from 227 countries, for the Celebrity Chef World category, again in the World Gourmand Book Awards. Somizi’s in there with the same level of chances as Richard Xu of China and Matt Preston of Australia.

Somizi Mhlongo’s book launch with Dale, Somizi and Funeka Peppeta from That Food Guy Publishing. (Photo: Supplied)

It isn’t ending there. I happened to see in my copy of Petals from Paris that Dale’s own company published it. I didn’t see him at the launch but he was there and said that working with a brand in retail was an opportunity for him “of a lifetime”. He said it was breathtaking to “be witness to the intricacies of how a cake, pastry or savoury item comes together”. 

Again he spoke about the visual side and how he saw and was so interested in the colour palette, working on that Just Teddy book: “From muted brown tones in the bakery to pops of red, green and gold.” I hadn’t noticed that.

The Unpretentious Cupcake featured in Just Teddy’s Petals from Paris. (Photo: That Food Guy Publishing & Charl Steyn)

Of course, a lot of what he does with his clients is on video, on YouTube. Every medium is his. When Dale Herbst claims for That Food Guy to be the creative director, the brand strategist, broadcast and digital marketing specialist, he is. But there’s more. 

Dale is adding a food related That Food Guy Shop to everything else that he does. Then he’s going to have a pre-loved food book shop too. He’s fascinated by learning from those writers. Well, there’s me, without resistance. Soon we too can get all the books we still hunger for, all our Elizabeth Davids, our Larousses, Jeffrey Steingartens, Marco Pierre Whites, Anthony Bourdains, Dorah Sitholes, Elizabeth Andohs. Did you know that George Orwell wrote a sort of food book called Down and Out in Paris and London about the poorer food end of things? I want it.

At the end of a long coffee and water fuelled conversation in the local pub’s garden, I know I do want to know That Food Guy. He’s not even 30 and has already accomplished so much madly impressive food work. We even have a happy lunch date for a pizza coming up shortly. I’ve sort of given up eating pizza unless it’s, you know, Coalition’s or it’s in the south of Italy. Yet, I have agreed. Yep. DM/TGIFood

The writer supports Nosh Food Rescue, an NGO that helps Jozi feeding schemes with food ‘rescued’ from the food chain. Please support them here.