Spar will begin piloting a refreshed version of its Spar2U on-demand shopping service from December, the group said on Monday in a trading update that also warned FY2026 earnings would fall short of the previous year’s.
The new Spar2U “proposition” was shaped with a retailer advisory group, Spar said in the voluntary update to investors on Monday. Spar first launched Spar2U in 2022, when it came late to a market that Shoprite’s Checkers Sixty60 had seized during the Covid lockdowns.
Spar2U is one of several growth initiatives moving through what the company called “defined pilots”, alongside a repositioning of Spar’s private-label brands and a broader customer relevance refresh. Spar said these initiatives, together with work on merchandising, pricing, marketing and retailer technology, “form part of one integrated recovery plan rather than separate workstreams”.
Most Spar stores are owned by independent retailers who buy from the group’s distribution centres – a model that has complicated the roll-out of a single online service, as Spar’s omnichannel executive, Blake Raubenheimer, explained on the TechCentral Show last year.
Monday’s update said Spar’s wholesale executives and representatives of the Guild, which represents Spar retailers, spent two days in working sessions in KwaZulu-Natal on 16 and 17 September. Retailers and the group “exchanged views transparently, worked through practical obstacles and agreed on shared accountability”, Spar said.
The refresh follows a period of confident claims. In May 2025, Spar said Spar2U had grown from 87 sites in 2022 to more than 500, that orders had risen by 285% year on year and that the service led the market in value. It gave no updated figures on Monday.
Under pressure
The competition has not stood still. By late 2025, Sixty60 was turning over R11.9-billion in a single six-month period from about 875 stores, TechCentral reported in June.
Spar’s technology budget is under pressure, too. The group said cost-optimisation efforts are focused “primarily on IT, discretionary spend, marketing and logistics”.
It also reported progress on its SAP systems. SAP’s finance software is now “live and stable” in Spar’s central office and four distribution centres, three of which went live in early August. Flooring remediation at the KwaZulu-Natal distribution centre is complete, a temporary overflow warehouse has been vacated and gross margin in the region is improving month on month, Spar said.
The financial picture remains weak. Spar said FY2026 is expected to underperform FY2025, with the pressure concentrated in its Southern African groceries and liquor business. Revenue growth in Southern Africa was “modest” in the 48 weeks to 28 August as consumers contended with higher fuel and utility costs and elevated interest rates, and credit losses among its retailers remained elevated. — © 2026 NewsCentral Media
