Taking it to the enemy this week (and by the enemy, to be clear, we mean Checkers) is Pick n Pay, whose asap! delivery service last week ran a ‘live shopping show event’ (their words) on its own pnp.co.za site and various social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Hosted by some of South Africa’s favourite influencers – including the formidable Mbali Nhlapo and The Funny Chef – the live event showcased products, from quality cleaning supplies to budget-friendly meal options, throughout the broadcast. The event quickly gained traction, trending on X and resulting in an overnight order increase of over +200% on the asap! app, with an average watch time of 10 minutes per 15-minute segment. “This is our fresh approach to online grocery shopping, tailored to today’s customers who want to shop conveniently from home while being entertained and informed,” says co-head of Omnichannel, Vincent Viviers.

Comment: Good work – fast, cheap and effective, and aimed at tomorrow’s shoppers.

Congrats this week go to Clicks, winner of the 2024 Kantar BrandZ ‘Most Meaningfully Different’ brand award in its category, which, ironically, it receives in part for providing customers with a consistent store experience regardless of location. Kantar reports that the combined value of South Africa’s Top 30 brands declined by 6% this year in the face of the externalities which by now have become too familiar to list, although one of them rhymes with “code redding”. By contrast, brands that are ‘Meaningfully Different’ grew their value, with Clicks up +3%. Kantar notes that Clicks has increased its ‘Meaningfulness’ score by 18 index points in a year, has since 2019 had the highest ‘Experience’ score of any brand in the ranking, and is especially good at inspiring trust in consumers.

Comment: A uniquely South African success story, and a business which could hold its own against any similar retailer globally.

It’s Shoprite and Checkers Championship Boerewors season again, and one mark of how central this institution has become on the South African culinary calendar is that the ten finalists have entered the contest a combined 100+ times! The winner, Ruard Briel, is a financial manager and big game hunter from Centurion who has been perfecting his recipe over the course of a decade. It will soon be available for sampling under garden laphas and at shisanyamas around the country. Next, Woolies has let it be known that some of the popular beverages at its WCafés will not be available for one to two weeks due to congestion at Durban harbour, where turnaround time has reached a risible four days plus at the container terminal, while truck turnaround time has averaged a ludicrous 101 minutes against the target of just over an hour. Woolies is being cagey about which drinks exactly are affected but has hinted that you might want to look for an alternative to your white mocha. Finally, Pick n Pay is rolling out 210 new e-waste bins nationwide, which will help create meaningful employment for people with disabilities through specialised training in repairing, refurbishing, and recycling e-waste.

Comment: The inefficiency of our ports, notably Durban, is a dishonest and incompetent waste of our country’s economic potential.

If you really want to hear more about the on-again-off-again Albertson’s-Kroger merger in the US, may we recommend instead Days of Our Lives? And in the absence of any harder grocery news from beyond our borders this week, there’s this: TikTok, which can make a thing out of anything, has made a thing out of grocery tourism, which – as it sounds – means going to other countries and marvelling at the splendours and the idiosyncrasies of their supermarkets, then telling your friends about it on their phones. “This may be controversial, but I think that the best thing to do while travelling is go to the grocery store,” says one TikToker. “Going to a grocery store could technically be counted as sightseeing, right? Because not only is it a cultural experience, but you can also find lots of stuff to bring back as souvenirs.” Some TikTokers have reputedly flown to LA just to experience the glories of the Hailey Bieber smoothie at the deeply Californian grocer Erehwon Market.

Comment: Where would you send a visitor to South Africa? We would say any mid-size independent in the Platteland would deliver the goods.

As anyone wrestling with the recycling will know, drinks packaging is something of a conundrum: Cardboard? Plastic? Foil? All of the above, and some sort of waxy residue too? It’s tricky stuff to recycle, which is why news this week from Tetra Pak will be welcome to those who care about these things: Tetra Pak Southern Africa has as of mid-2024 significantly increased the recycling rate of Liquid Board Packaging (LBP) to over 20%. To be clear, the improved rate is not due to improvements in the materials used, but in collaborations with major recyclers like Mpact and Gayatri Paper Mills, which have incorporated Tetra Pak (LBP) carton collection into their operations. “We’ve now taken everything we’ve learned over our 19-year journey with PET (plastics) and are applying our experience to building a sustainable model for LBP,” says Tetra Pak partner Petco’s CEO Cheri Scholtz. “This is in line with our expanded vision to drive circularity within the broader packaging value chain.”

Comment: Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, as they say. And this modest but significant step from Tetra Pak is definitely good.

A modest shout out to Tiger Brands CEO Tjaart Kruger who has had his contract extended through 2028, having successfully implemented a new operating model for the group and improved group culture and staff engagement since he took the business by the tail, as it were, in late 2023. And congrats, we guess, to Danone, which has announced a multi-year collaboration with Microsoft to integrate AI throughout its operations. Operational efficiency, more responsive logistics management, data-driven decision-making, AI will do it all. “Working together is not just about technology; it’s about fostering a culture of continuous learning, innovation and performance across our organization,” says a human person associated with the business. Finally, Adcock Ingram has released a solid set of annuals, with HEPS, an opaque but reliable measure of profitability, up +10%. One of the drivers is the return of COVID, in a form more treatable as a sort of flu, upping sales of such kitchen cabinet staples as Panado and Corenza-C.

Comment: The AI genie is well and truly out of the bottle. And we’re all just figuring out what size stopper we’ll need.

Some excellent news last week was that retail trade sales for June came storming in with an increase of +4.1% YoY, with ‘general dealers’ up +7.3%, the ‘textiles, clothing, footwear and leather’ chaps up +6.1%, but sadly our own great industry, labelled by StatsSA as ‘food, beverages and tobacco in specialised stores’ down -1.5%. “South Africans opened their wallets a little wider in June amid tentative optimism about the post-election economic outlook,” puffed analysts at Oxford Economics. CPI for July was 4.6%, down from 5.1% in June 2024, which suggests that further consumer spending may be on the cards – and also that the Reserve Bank might lower the interest rate in September. And it seems likely that we will have avoided a negative GDP scenario in Q2, skirting once again the perilous edges of recession.

Comment: South Africa, eh? Always on the brink of disaster. No wonder we love playing Ireland.