Shoprite increases stake in company that helped build Checkers Sixty60

The Shoprite Group has increased its shareholding in Zulzi On Demand, the company that helped build the original Checkers Sixty60 platform, from 26% to 41.2% during the year ended 28 June 2026.

This was revealed in the group’s financial results for the period, which also estimated the value of its Zulzi shareholding at around R7 million.

“The Group increased its equity-accounted associate shareholding in the on-demand delivery company Zulzi On Demand from 26.0% to 41.2% during the year,” Shoprite said.

Shoprite’s Checkers Sixty60 on-demand delivery platform is the biggest in the country, and Zulzi is partially to thank for its success, at least initially.

Zulzi helped build the initial Checkers Sixty60, and the company previously told MyBroadband that it still played a major role in maintaining the platform.

Shoprite previously explained that Sixty60 was a project of ShopriteX, the group’s innovation hub, with various parties contributing elements to the final product, including Zulzi.

Zulzi itself offers an on-demand delivery service that extends beyond groceries to include liquor and pharmaceutical deliveries from 7 dark stores.

In August 2024, it said the platform had undergone a revamp and was processing more than 5,000 orders daily from its dark stores.

“Our dark stores are located in Johannesburg North, Pretoria, and Centurion. We have continued to grow at 80% year-on-year, and we currently have 300 drivers on our network,” it said.

Zulzi founder Vutlharhi “Donald” Valoyi launched the platform in 2013. He intended to improve the speed at which online shopping packages were delivered in South Africa.

Two years later, Zulzi started delivering books and electronics to students in under an hour, and its user base grew rapidly.

Zulzi’s growth grabbed the attention of larger retailers in the country, including Shoprite’s Checkers. Valoyi said Checkers was interested as it had no legacy systems at the time.

“We started to chat to them when they realised that we could build world-class systems that address some of their complex problems,” Valoyi said.

Zulzi developed the original customer-facing Checkers Sixty60 app and helped find a solution for substituting missing products in real time.

It also built an engine that manages product catalogues and a dashboard to administer orders, users, and store managers.

However, MyBroadband understands that another software house was responsible for the integration into Shoprite’s SAP enterprise resource planning system.

“Sixty60 has been a huge success and an example of what we can do when we work together,” Valoyi said.

“Big corporations must be more flexible and be open to working with startups and allow them freedom to continue to grow.”