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# Albany is selling bread off the pavement, and wants 3 000 stands doing it
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/albany-is-selling-bread-off-the-pavement-and-wants-3-000-stands-doing-it/
- Published: 2026-09-04T03:45:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T03:44:59.000Z
- Description: Tiger Brands supplies the stand and the daily delivery, the vendor supplies the labour, and the company puts the income at about R1 300 a month.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

Getting a loaf of Albany bread into a South African household is mostly a supermarket problem. Tiger Brands has decided a growing share of it is a pavement problem instead.

The company says more than 800 branded bread stands are already trading, each run by one person, at taxi ranks, bus stations and busy roadsides near Albany bakeries in Gauteng, the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and the Free State. It wants 3 000 of them within the next year.

## What the stand costs and what it earns

The arrangement is built so the vendor starts with nothing down. Tiger Brands supplies a branded stand it values at about R2 700, along with marketing material, and delivers bread daily through Albany's own distribution network so nobody has to buy stock up front. Vendors are recruited by referral from trade and community contacts.

The income is modest and the company does not hide it. Each stand sells 20 to 30 loaves a day at roughly R2 profit a loaf, which Tiger Brands puts at about R1 300 a month for someone trading every day. It calls the stands entrepreneurial opportunities, not jobs.

Quinton Swart, who runs Tiger Brands' bakeries, puts two arguments in one sentence. The programme lets Albany “compete more effectively in a highly competitive local bread market, while bringing our product closer to consumers”, and it makes “a contribution to our country's unemployment rate”. The company cites Stats SA's August survey, which put unemployment among 15 to 34 year olds at 47.4%, with close to five million in that age group neither working nor looking for work.

## The bakeries that need somewhere to send the bread

The stands are the cheap end of a much larger bet. Tiger Brands has built super bakeries in Gauteng and the Western Cape to replace five older plants, and reported figures put the Gauteng site at half the conversion cost, R250 million less overhead a year and 12 000 loaves an hour at full capacity.

That output needs an outlet. Tiger Brands has been working the informal market since 2020, after research showed that at times only 27% of its products were available at the lower end of it, and it estimates that market at R1 trillion. Coca-Cola and South African Breweries are the playbook it says it is following.

The next test is a count. Tiger Brands wants to go from more than 800 stands to 3 000 inside a year, and so far the only source for any of it, the R1 300 included, is Tiger Brands.