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# Famous Brands is chasing convenience with drive-thrus and delivery hubs
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/famous-brands-drive-thrus-delivery-hubs-profit-slips/
- Published: 2026-10-22T03:45:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-22T03:44:59.000Z
- Description: Steers' owner is moving its restaurants closer to customers who would rather not make the trip, and the business that supplies those kitchens is where its profit held up.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News, #big

Convenience has become a big part of how South Africans buy their food. Delivery apps like Uber Eats and Mr D are the obvious part, but drive-thrus, takeaway collections and smaller, better-placed restaurants all belong to the same shift. That is why Famous Brands, the group behind Steers, Wimpy, Debonairs and Mugg & Bean, is worth watching.

Its results for the six months to August, released on Wednesday, say convenience is now shaping how people buy food, driving demand for delivery, collection and drive-thru. They also name a newer rival. Online grocery platforms are growing fast, giving people another convenient alternative to restaurant delivery and cutting foot traffic at malls as more shoppers opt for home delivery. Add fuel prices pushed up by the US-Iran conflict, and households are eating out less often.

## Moving the restaurant closer to you

Famous Brands' answer is to rethink where its restaurants sit and how customers get their food. Over the half, its franchise partners opened 48 restaurants and revamped another 67\. That included four new drive-thrus, bringing the total to 81, and 14 new delivery hubs, which prepare food specifically for delivery, taking that network to 87\. It is also rolling out smaller restaurants in more convenient locations, which makes collecting an order easier.

Keep it in proportion. These are small changes for a group with 3,070 restaurants, where drive-thrus are still roughly one in every forty. But they show which way the business is heading.

## The business behind the counter

There is another side to Famous Brands worth understanding as it expands. The group makes and distributes many of the ingredients its franchisees use, so it also earns from supplying those restaurants. That supply chain is bigger than you might expect. It brought in R3.1 billion of revenue in the half, roughly 72% of the group's R4.3 billion, and its operating profit rose 13% to R230 million, helped by cheaper beef and coffee beans.

The rest of the group had a harder time. Group operating profit fell 4.7% to R375 million, with Botswana's diamond slump squeezing shoppers there and the smaller Signature Brands sliding deeper into a loss, and earnings per share fell too. Cash was the bright spot: free cash flow more than doubled to R459 million after Famous Brands cut its own spending on buildings and equipment by 73%, and it paid an interim dividend of 170 cents a share, up from 162 cents.

That is what makes the convenience push worth watching. It is not only about opening more drive-thrus or making delivery easier. Every new restaurant, hub or smaller format is also another customer for the supply chain behind it, so as South Africans change how they buy food, Famous Brands is set up to earn on both sides of the counter.