Today’s edition
Home Cooking
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Good morning. Woolworths is about to own the company that has made convenience food for it for more than 30 years. The two men who started LekkeSlaap in a garage have sold it to a group with old South African banking money behind it. And Standard Bank has found a way to buy, sell and sit on the board of one Nigerian payments app, all at once. Nobody wants to be just the customer any more. Let’s get into it.
MARKETS
OWN BRAND
A supplier has made Woolworths food for 30 years, and within a month Woolworths expects to own it
If you have ever grabbed a ready meal off a Woolies shelf, there is a good chance Woolworths did not make it. Many of them come from in2food, which has supplied the retailer for more than 30 years. On Thursday, Woolworths said every regulator had signed off on buying the whole business, and the deal should close within a month.
The timing fits a bigger shift. Sam Ngumeni, who used to run Woolworths Food, took over as CEO in June, and his first results set out a plan to build the group around food and put the money behind what is already working.
What changes in store:
- More, and sooner. Owning in2food, with eight factories and more than R5 billion a year in sales, should mean steadier supply, more variety and new products reaching shelves faster.
- Food gets first call. It made up two-thirds of everything the group sold last year, R55.4 billion of it, and grew faster than the rest.
- Clothes may get less. Fashion, beauty and home’s operating profit fell 14.1%, and that side could shrink as food takes more of the space and the money.
Owning in2food comes with a condition: for a set period, the Competition Commission says Woolworths must keep buying from in2food’s rivals too.
CHECKING OUT
LekkeSlaap began in a garage with R12,000, and 17 years later its founders have sold it
In 2009, two 25-year-old graduates put R12,000 into a holiday-booking site and ran it out of a garage. Jonathan Womersley and Marcel van de Ghinste called it TravelGround, and in 2013 they launched LekkeSlaap, South Africa’s first Afrikaans site for booking holiday stays. It didn’t stay Afrikaans for long, and it was two years old when Airbnb arrived here in 2015. Today it lists more than 40,000 places to stay across Southern Africa. On Thursday, the two founders sold it and stepped away.
The buyers are long-term local money. Bellair Road Investment Partners and Janic Capital, the Dippenaar family’s investment company, lead the group, with the Moolman Family Office, Investec and the family office of Rand Merchant Bank co-founder GT Ferreira alongside. Herman Bosman, who chairs OUTsurance, becomes chairman and has put money in too. Chief executive Frans Joubert and his team have also invested and are staying, and LekkeSlaap says nothing changes for guests or hosts. The deal covers all of Tripco, the parent company, and nobody has said what anyone paid.
Next comes the push into more of Southern Africa and more spending on technology, up against Airbnb and Booking.com, without the two founders for the first time in 17 years.
BAGEL BITE
What is the study of fungi called?
A. Microbiology
B. Mycology
C. Bryology
DOING THE ROUNDS
Standard Bank is about to be a lot of things to one Nigerian payments app. OPay, which is heading for a New York listing, has agreed to sell the bank up to US$200 million of shares, which it must hold for a year, and Standard Bank is also one of the lead banks running that listing. Its Africa Regions head, Lungisa Fuzile, is lined up for OPay's board. All of it rests on an app that made almost 90% of its first-half revenue in Nigeria. Full story →
Jemima Meyer, a clinical dietitian from Bloemfontein, found it "super frustrating" that so many hospital patients who needed nutrition care never got it. She and her brother Josiah built Healthleap around that gap. Its software goes through patient records to flag people at risk of conditions that get missed, starting with malnutrition, and it already runs in more than 50 hospitals. This week the San Francisco company raised US$38 million, about R630 million, from investors including Sequoia. It does not diagnose anyone; it flags them for a closer look. Full story →
South Africa's best place to work, if you ask the people doing the work, is a bank. Nedbank came 26th on Forbes' World's Best Employers list for 2026, the highest of any local company, swapping places with Standard Bank, which slid to 54th. Half of the dozen South African names on the list are banks or financial groups. MTN is the best-placed outside finance. The ranking rests on what more than 300,000 employees told a survey, not on anyone checking their payslips. Full story →
Starlink's satellite phone service has one obvious weakness, and it is walls. SpaceX has agreed to buy a nationwide block of US airwaves in the 800MHz band, the kind that reaches inside buildings, reportedly for about US$8 billion, so Starlink Mobile can work indoors on the phones people already own. Shares in T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T fell about 6% after hours. South Africans will not see any of it soon, because Starlink is not licensed here and SpaceX has never applied. Full story →
WEATHER
BAGEL GAMES
Have you got what it takes to win today’s Wordle? Play here →
THE ANSWER
As for the Bagel Bite, the answer is: B. Mycology
Fungi are their own kingdom of life, separate from both plants and animals, and in some ways more closely related to animals. Mycologists study everything from edible mushrooms to the moulds used to make medicines like penicillin. Fungi play a vital role in nature by breaking down dead material and recycling nutrients.
That’s your Monday under way. Enjoyed it? Forward it on, a friend can subscribe in a click. Written by the Business Bagel crew.