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# Shoprite’s CEO explains why rivals would struggle to build their own Sixty60
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/shoprite-sixty60-store-picking-r25-5-billion/
- Published: 2026-09-03T02:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-03T02:29:59.000Z
- Description: Shoprite tried grocery delivery the way everyone else does it, gave up on that in 2019, and built a R25.5 billion business off the floors of its own supermarkets instead.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

Every grocery delivery service in the world started with a warehouse. Shoprite built three of them in 2019, decided quickly that the model would not work, and fell back on the thing it had treated as a handicap: a very large number of big supermarkets sitting inside South African suburbs. Six years on, Sixty60 sold R25.5 billion of groceries in a year, and the picking still happens off shelves that customers walk past.

Picking from the shop floor is why the service reaches almost everyone. Shoprite reckons its stores put it within five kilometres of 90% of the customers it could plausibly serve, and when it started, nobody else in the world was delivering that way. The growth has not settled down either. On-demand sales rose 34.5% last year, and the R6.6 billion of new business that came with it is the biggest single-year jump the service has had.

## The years and the money a rival would need

Asked at an investor presentation whether a competitor could build the same thing, Pieter Engelbrecht said they could, and then set out the bill. It is not the app. The business system underneath Sixty60 went in during 2017, the Xtra Savings rewards programme was built on top of that, and the delivery service itself came later. Shoprite has put R22.6 billion into technology, supply chain and stores over the past three years, and another R7.7 billion is going in this year.

## Where the extra sales came from

The delivery business is still the small part of it. Shoprite sold R270.8 billion of merchandise from continuing operations last year, and it did that while lifting its own shelf prices in South African supermarkets by 0.8%, against official food and drink inflation of 3.9%. So the extra sales came from more people buying more things rather than from charging more for them. About 1.1 million more customers a week now go through the tills.

Checkers is where Sixty60 grew up, but it now picks from 137 Shoprite-branded stores as well, and those baskets are smaller and still turning a profit. The company had expected the Shoprite side to grow more slowly than the Checkers side, and says the take-up surprised it. It keeps expecting the growth to slow, and keeps setting new order records instead.