Checkers Sixty60 sold R11.9bn in the 26 weeks to H1 2026, up 34.6%, delivering from 875 stores. That is 10.3% of Shoprite's South African sales and more than a third of the group's entire sales growth for the period.
Read as a grocery story it is a strong number. Read from behind a counter it is something else.
What it is actually taking
Sixty60 is not competing with you on food. Nobody prefers assembling a meal to being handed one.
It is competing for the moment at about half past five when a household decides what happens about dinner. That decision used to have two outcomes: cook something, or order from a restaurant. Grocery delivery in under an hour adds a third, and the third one wins on price almost every time.
This is why the usual competitive scan misses it. You are watching the chicken place that opened down the road and the burger brand two blocks over. Neither of them took the customer who decided, at 17:30 on a Tuesday, that R280 of groceries arriving in forty minutes beat R240 of delivered food.
The number to watch is the deceleration
Growth fell from 47.1% to 34.6% over two years. That is still a rate most operators would take, and on a much larger base it represents more rand than the faster year did. But the direction matters.
A category growing at 47% is still recruiting. A category growing at 34% on a big base is starting to look like a habit that has found most of the people it is going to find. The land-grab phase of grocery delivery is closer to its end than its beginning, which means the customers it has taken from the dinner occasion are unlikely to drift back on their own.
What actually responds
Three things are worth testing, and one is not.
Not worth testing: competing on price with a supermarket. You will lose. Their basket carries a retail margin across dozens of lines and yours carries a kitchen.
Worth testing:
- The occasion they cannot serve. Sixty60 delivers ingredients and cooking. It does not deliver not having to think, and it does not deliver a table. Anything that trades on the customer wanting the evening handled is defensible ground.
- Your own delivery economics, honestly. If you are paying an aggregator 25% to compete on convenience against a business that owns its fleet, you are funding a fight on their terms.
- The weekday-to-weekend split in your own numbers. The occasion Sixty60 takes is concentrated on weeknights. If your trade has flattened on Tuesdays and Wednesdays but held on Friday and Saturday, you are looking at this and not at a general downturn.
The last one costs nothing and you can do it this week, from data you already have.
