Stocktake: Weekly retail and brand news roundup

News from CS Sales Holdings; Engen; Spar; Libstar; Walmart; Wells Fargo; Serco; and a Meme-of-the-Week Gallery – in case you still have a sense of humour left after all the loadshedding.

Diversified retailer CA Sales lists on the JSE

The JSE has listed CA Sales Holdings Limited on its main board, providing South African investors with exposure to the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company with a footprint in several Southern African countries. CA Sales was first incorporated in South Africa in 2011 and then spread its wings to Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Zambia. The company offers a wide range of services to blue-chip manufacturers in the FMCG industry including selling, merchandising, warehousing, distribution, debtors’ administration, marketing and promotions, point of sale warehousing and training. In a pre-listing statement released on 6 June 2022, CA Sales informed its shareholders that it was moving its dual primary listing from Cape Town Stock Exchange to the JSE. The company anticipates that its market capitalisation will be about R2.2 billion at the date of the listing. The company, classified as a diversified retailer on the JSE, has floated 461.4 million shares on the Main Board, where it is trading under the code CAA. Commenting on the company’s listing, Duncan Lewis, CEO, CA Sales Holdings Limited, said: “As a collective of well-established FMCG service businesses operating across Southern Africa, specialising in route to market services to owners of the world’s most loved brands, we look forward to our dual listing, on the JSE and Botswana Stock Exchange (BSE), raising the profile of our Group with South African based retail and institutional investor community.”

Spar launches in store Food Stall offering

SPAR has launched The Food Stall concept at its deli service counters across stores nationwide. According to Pianca Meintjies, Spar group home meal replacement manager, The Food Stall will be a continuous focus for Spar, with more being launched weekly. She adds that The Food Stall is community-focused and aims to provide customers with so many choices that they don’t have to shop anywhere else. “The Food Stall at Spar offers a unique experience at every store, but in essence, it’s a range of freshly prepared, tasty and convenient foods.” Food Stalls are usually associated with markets and street food and Spar wants to bring these authentic, highly-original eating experiences under their roof, available to their customers every day, in an environment they already know and love. Convenience food packaging has long been a contentious issue and the retailer has introduced more environmentally-friendly packaging solutions.

Engen rolls out DSV logistics partnership at 257 forecourts

Engen’s partnership with global transport and logistics firm DSV is now available at 257 Engen retail services stations across South Africa. Delivery options available to Engen customers include physical address-to-locker, and locker-to-physical address delivery services, anywhere in South Africa. The DSV lockers and associated courier services allow for a cost-effective, convenient, and safe way to send and receive parcels – which you can do 24/7 while you fill up with petrol and buy your everyday necessities from Quickshop. Launched in 2014, the DSV Locker meets first and final mile needs in an industry fuelled by the growth of direct to consumer, staff, or supplier requirements. With a courier and packaging solution starting from R55 (incl. VAT), this cost-effective service appeals to a wide range of customers, including small home businesses, students, residents, banks, and retailers. Delivery options include physical address to-locker, and locker-to-physical address delivery services, anywhere in South Africa. Customers can use the Engen 1app to find their nearest Engen with a DSV Locker.

Reducing packaging waste

Listed consumer packaged goods (CPG) group Libstar, is looking to reduce waste and contribute to the circular economy by investing in sustainable packaging. According to a 2021 Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) report, 45% of the available food supply in South Africa is wasted, with 49% of the waste taking place in the processing and packaging stage. With the situation in the Ukraine threatening to spark a global food shortage, eliminating waste has never been more important. Derek Couzens, commercial executive at Rialto, a member of the Libstar family, says, “In 2018, we started off with just five biodegradable and compostable products in our Food Service offering. Now, we have over 120 and counting, including our Precious Planet range of our enviro-friendly packaging products. By the end of the year, we are aiming for 40% of all our Food Service packaging to be entirely sustainable, either recyclable, biodegradable, or compostable. That is essential if we are to do our part in being responsible corporate citizens.” The circular economy is an economic model designed to minimise waste by moving away from single use materials and encouraging sustainable production techniques. From a packaging perspective, this means creating and utilising materials that can be recycled, used as compost or reused repeatedly. For example, the push for creating circular economies has fuelled the use of bagasse, a waste product of sugarcane, as a sustainable packaging solution. According to the Paper Manufacturers Association of South Africa (Pamsa), in 2022 the local recycling rate of paper and board in South Africa is 70% versus the global rate of 59.1%. Couzens concludes, “Everyone has a role to play, and the key is the acceptance of our roles. For our part, the job is to make sure that our manufacturing and packaging processes are as green and eco-friendly as we can possibly make them. Companies that fail to take sustainability seriously will have a hard task attracting the customers of the future.”

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Consumer confidence is falling worldwide, dropping below pandemic levels – to levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. NPD researchers found that 83% of U.S consumers plan to make changes to reduce their product spending in the next three to six months. So, what’s a retailer to do in planning for the year-end holiday season? “They’re guessing. They’re all guessing. And any one of them that tells you they’re not guessing, they’re lying, because they don’t know,” said John McQuiston, managing director and global head of originations, receivables and trade finance with Wells Fargo. “The demand levels are entirely unpredictable. Consumer behavior is unpredictable. … This is a bit of a crystal ball Christmas.”

Walmart has launced an AR inventory management app. Srini Venkatesan EVP at Walmart Global Tech wrote: “[The app] instantly maps and tracks every box in the backroom for store associates. Rather than the old method of associates manually moving and lifting boxes to read the label on each to determine the contents, the solution we built relies on camera-readable labels affixed to each box, highlighting boxes to show which items need to be moved to shelves. This technology reduces the need for manually scanning each box to find the correct one.” The AR app is currently live in 3,500 stores and will roll out to all remaining Walmart stores this summer. Take a look at the short Walmart video.

Enjoy Technology, a retail startup founded by former Apple and J.C. Penney exec Ron Johnson, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday, mere months after it made its stock market debut. The company’s liquidity has dwindled while its business has suffered from staffing shortages. Enjoy, which operates mobile retail stores, went public in October through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Enjoy said in a filing that it plans to sell its assets in the United States to the technology repair company Asurion.

*Additional sources: AdWeek, Total Retail Report, Perch Interactive, CMO Council.

Meme-of-the-Week

We’re not sure anyone is really coping with continuous Stage 4-6 loadshedding right now – even the memes don’t seem that funny anymore. But hello, solar and rechargeable light bulbs and all the other innovations springing up! Anyway, this is our collection of recent loadshedding memes, if you still have a sense of humour left.

This week in numbers

20,000 km

Vehicles of all descriptions – including trucks and trailers – are suffering damage due to the shocking condition of some roads in South Africa, says Serco national truck and trailer building company, which has seen a noticeable increase in repair sales this year. Indications are that in many areas the state of roads – especially in country districts – is getting worse rather than being improved. Repairs to potholes and damaged sections of roads are often not done efficiently and soon fall back into disrepair. Serco MD, Charl Coetzee, said his company had extensive repair facilities at its branches in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Gqeberha .”We are seeing a lot of damage to suspensions, tyres and rims, and air bags on heavy vehicles – a large amount of which has been caused by the state of roads in some parts of our country. Coetzee says because of the bad condition of many roads in the North West and Limpopo provinces it is dangerous for heavy vehicles to travel on them at night thus causing delays in deliveries. In an effort to improve the state of provincial roads, government said in a report recently that it was rolling out a labour-intensive road construction and maintenance programme, with targets for physical works including resealing, blacktop patching, pothole repairs and maintenance of gravel roads. Among projects authorities have committed to is the maintenance of about 20,000 km of roads in South Africa’s secondary road network by March next year. These are Provincial roads in urgent need of being upgraded to an acceptable state of repair.

QUOTE of the week:

“New extended reality (XR) offerings could put all the power of enterprise-grade AI into the hands of local retailers. What’s more, it will lay the groundwork for a future metaverse play, making it an important tech for the CMO radar,” writes Johan Walters, Incubeta lead consultant, on Retailing Africa.

Main image credit: Spar Group.

*Stocktake is a weekly roundup of current FMCG retailing and brand news, curated and edited by Retailing Africa Publisher & Editor, Louise Burgers. Keep the industry updated and send your announcements and news to: news@retailingafrica.com.

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