Number Of The Day | 1,700 | 28 September 2026

Number Of The Day | 1,700 | 28 September 2026 Vusi.Bafetane Mon, 09/28/2026 - 17:54

The Grocery War Is No Longer About Who Has The Most Stores

For years, supermarket scale was easy to understand. More stores meant more reach, stronger buying power and a better chance of being the shop closest to the customer. That logic still matters, but South Africa’s grocery battle is increasingly being fought somewhere else: in the space between deciding you need something and getting it into your hands.

That shift helps explain why SPAR’s roughly 1,700-store South African footprint is both an enormous asset and no guarantee of an easy turnaround. The retailer expects its 2026 financial performance to trail 2025, while acknowledging that operational improvements have not yet produced sufficient earnings or cash

benefits. At the same time, its core model is being tested by a market in which convenience is no longer measured only by distance.

The meaning of convenience has changed

SPAR’s traditional proposition is unusually local. It operates primarily as a wholesaler supplying independently owned retailers, allowing individual stores to respond to neighbourhood demand rather than following one completely centralised formula. In the Number of the Day discussion, Francis Herd explains that those retailers can even source certain products outside SPAR’s own wholesale network if that better serves their community.

The difficulty is that digital retail has changed the customer's definition of local. A supermarket two kilometres away may still be less convenient than an app that can deliver to the front door.

That is where Checkers Sixty60 has changed the competitive standard. Shoprite reported R18.9 billion in Sixty60 sales in its 2025 financial year, up 47.7%, with the service operating from hundreds of locations and using existing stores as fulfilment hubs. The company has explicitly described its strategy as a race for both physical and digital reach.

By 2026, that race had moved beyond speed alone. Pick n Pay introduced an AI shopping assistant, while Shoprite added personalised AI tools to Sixty60. Industry analysis increasingly describes successful retailers as businesses that remove friction from the entire shopping journey rather than simply putting more products on more shelves.

For SPAR, that means being neighbourhood-based may still matter, but it can no longer be the complete proposition.

A turnaround has to work across a network

SPAR also faces a structural challenge that is easy to underestimate. Its stores are not simply branches controlled from one head office. The system depends on the relationship between the wholesaler and independent retailers.

That creates flexibility, but it also makes alignment critical. SPAR’s September update acknowledged difficult issues between the group and retailers while saying collaboration had improved. Management identified retailer profitability, service levels, overdue debt, cash generation and leverage among the measures that will determine whether the turnaround is succeeding.

The business therefore has to repair several things at once: financial performance, retailer confidence, operational execution and customer relevance. None can be treated as a side project because weakness in one part of the system can travel through the rest.

Why this matters beyond SPAR

A weaker competitor does not affect only investors. South Africa’s major grocery groups compete for household spending in a country where consumers remain highly sensitive to transport, electricity, interest and food costs. SPAR itself says those pressures are weighing on consumer sentiment and wholesale revenue.

Competition matters because it forces retailers to fight harder for that constrained household budget. Gareth Edwards makes the point directly in the episode: losing a large competitor would narrow consumer choice. Francis Herd extends the chain to independent owners, workers and suppliers before concluding that retailers under competitive pressure have more reason to deliver what consumers want at good prices.

SPAR’s challenge, then, is bigger than restoring a set of financial ratios. It is deciding what its scale, community roots and independent-store network mean in a market where convenience is increasingly digital.

The 1,700 stores still matter. The harder question is whether the experience attached to those stores can evolve quickly enough to matter just as much to the next generation of shoppers.

References

The SPAR Group, Voluntary Update on Board Appointment Process, Operational Turnaround and Performance to Date, 28 September 2026.

Katharine Child, Spar warns 2026 performance will lag 2025 as turnaround progresses, Moneyweb, 28 September 2026.

Shoprite Holdings, Integrated Report 2025 and FY2025 results.

Number of the Day, 28 September 2026 episode transcript.

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