Quick, name South Africa’s fourth largest retail chain when measured by numbers of branded stores, without referring to the top of this story. Nyeeergh! Wrong!! It is in fact The Corner Bakery, which has recently passed the crucial 400 store mark and is going strong. You will often have popped into the Corner Bakery down at your local Engen to buy fags and milk. It is a franchise outfit owned by Retsol out of Durban, and they kicked things off from scratch in 2010, with not a shop anywhere. Since then, they’ve averaged turnover growth of 20% per year, and now account for the employment of 2,000 souls. Getting into the nitty gritty now, Corner Bakery has a vertically integrated supply chain with its own factories and a line of 2,000 products, from which franchisees can choose between 60 and 100.

Comment: Is it just us, (ahem) or does Durban produce more innovative and hardworking businesses per capita than some of our bigger cities?

Zambia and Shoprite have never had what you’d call an easy relationship. There was the time Shoprite was ordered by the government to pay its workers triple the minimum wage, just because. The time when some of its Zambian shareholders traded Shoprite shares illegally on the Lusaka Stock Exchange. Then there was something about expired food, although we’re pretty sure that one was made up. Now it’s Polish milk. Apparently Shoprite has been importing UHT milk from Poland into Zambia, which is a net importer of the white and frothy, its own dairy industry being in its infancy. Shoprite had permission to bring milk in from South Africa, but not elsewhere, so the government has asked Shoprite to cease the Polish imports while it investigates the matter.

Comment: It seems that Shoprite has become a lightning rod in Zambia for any squeamishness about globalisation. Although it seems to be soldiering on regardless and taking these little obstacles in its stride.

So those Pick n Pay interims, then for which you have been waiting as the hart pants for the cool waters…oh get on with it! Alright then: sales up 8.5% to R34.9billion, fair enough, we weren’t expecting fireworks in this economy… but wait, what’s this? Headline Earnings Per Share (the signal measure of profitability in South Africa, apparently, which it really wasn’t when we started writing the Tatler late one Tuesday night in ’06) up 24.2% to 32.94 cents. Trading profit, which we find simpler and cleaner, call us old-fashioned, was up a still-respectable 19.7% to R461.6m. How’d they manage that? Don’t ask us, ask them: “Operational improvements include faster checkouts, Wi-Fi connectivity and automatic ordering and replenishment,” say Pick n Pay.  And how are they going to keep things going? Like everyone else, they intend to continue their push into the rest of Africa, where they've opened six stores in the 26 weeks to end-August, three in Namibia, one in Zambia and two in Zimbabwe. More details available here thanks to our merry bunch in research.

Comment: All of which you would have known if you’d had a look at our special report on the results, available above if you didn’t get it.

Food giant Nestlé, better known for assorted types of powdered milk and some truly delicious slabs of the rich and dark, is venturing where no food business has ever gone before, into the rich, dark soil of our own beloved country, where it has uprooted a handful of nutritious morogo and now intends to turn this into real money. Morogo is the Tswana name, as you know, for a family of leafy green vegetables known also as  imifino in Zulu and Xhosa and  used in traditional cuisine. Nestlé will be adding the most suitable of these – amaranthus – to a range of Maggi noodles. The project is a PPP with the Department of Science and Technology and the Agricultural Research Council, and is aimed in part at helping farmers boost their income by producing morogo on a commercial scale.

Comment: Excellent, excellent news which may be the first step for our humble homegrown greens on their long journey to the dining tables and restaurant kitchens of the world.

“Notwithstanding our good faith efforts, the Board of SABMiller has refused to meaningfully engage with us,” huffed ABInbev CEO Carlos Brito just last week. Turns out, amazingly, that all it took to get SAB’s board on-board, as it were, was a little more cash. Well, when we say a little, we mean a lot, obviously: having opened the bidding at $58 a share, ABInbev finally found success at $67.58, for a total of $104billion. The combined businesses currently have sales totalling $55billion, and will own nine of the world’s top twenty beers. Hilariously, both have attempted in recent months to defend themselves against loss of market share to actual beer by tapping (ahem) into the craft beer market, acquiring independent breweries on both sides of the Atlantic, and rendering them immediately corporate and decidedly uncrafty.

Comment: What breath-taking economies of scale can one business of this size achieve that two slightly smaller businesses could not? What mind-blowing innovations will they bring to the market, together, that they could not have done separately? Tell us, and then we’ll all know. In the meantime, shareholders will cash in, as if that’s the only thing that matters.

Great about old Angus, isn’t it? About time he was recogni….what? Deaton, of course. Angus Deaton. Princeton professor, economist, just been awarded the Nobel economics prize, you know the chap. And if you don’t, his work – which has focused substantially on the poor people of India – is based around questions whose answers have a more than passing bearing on our own great industry, namely: How do consumers distribute their spending among different goods? How much of society’s income is spent and how much is saved? How do we best measure and analyse welfare and poverty?

Comment: Look he’s not one of your Piketty’s or your John Maynard Keyne’s with their rhinestones and their wide lapels and their lowrider cars. But his quietly important work has informed policymakers and business leaders alike for decades, and has championed the cause of the poor and their dignity as consumers.

Ex-Unilever exec Dave Lewis has a novel idea about how to turn his new charge Tesco around: make Tesco new again, innovating everything from supplier relationships and pricing to debt, starting next week with a big policy statement on pricing. And it’s already begun to clean up its supplier relationships, moving to a single upfront price and no shifting goalposts. Bold work, from the man who brought the Dove Real Women campaign to the UK.