Pick n Pay continues to invest meaningfully in technology as it battles for market share with Shoprite Group’s Sixty60 and other retailers in the fast-growing on-demand grocery delivery market.
Pick n Pay is in the midst of a turnaround after losing market share to competitors in recent years. In its 2023 financial year, it plunged into a loss – of a staggering R3.2-billion. Former CEO Sean Summers, who left the company in 2007, returned to the helm in September of that year to lead the turnaround effort.
Summers’ early bets appear to be paying off, with the retailer’s most recent update reporting Pick n Pay sales were up 3.6% year on year in its core South African supermarkets business for the 17 weeks to 29 June 2025. Turnaround efforts have included a partnership with First National Bank’s eBucks rewards programme. eBucks was previously partnered with Checkers.
Sixty60 got a head-start during the Covid-19 lockdowns when consumers – stuck at home – took to e-commerce with vigour. Around the same time – in October 2020 – Pick n Pay acquired alcohol delivery app Bottles, which it would eventually use as the foundation for its own online platform, asap!.
Pick n Pay still has some way to go, though. Reports by both Pick n Pay and rival Shoprite last week show Sixty60 continuing to outpace its rival. But Pick n Pay is fighting back.
Enrico Ferigolli, who co-founded Bottles, now serves as head of online at Pick n Pay. Speaking to the TechCentral Show in an episode that will be published this week, Ferigolli said recent changes to Pick n Pay’s customer-facing applications are only the tip of the iceberg in the retailer’s strategic tech arsenal.
“It started with a rebrand, and then we embarked on a journey whose first iteration we just concluded, where the app is now fully integrated into the larger Pick n Pay ecosystem. If you are a Smart Shopper, you can now earn points, for example, so it’s a really unified experience.”
Overhaul
Pick n Pay in May unveiled an overhauled asap! app, adding a raft of new features to the platform and expanding the product catalogue available to customers, too. Asap!’s revamp was accompanied by similar updates to the Pick n Pay website, whose roll-out started in June.
According to Ferigolli, changes to frontend, consumer-facing interfaces are only a small part of the work being done to ensure asap! leverages technology effectively.
“We have had do a lot more backend work than people think might think. Because people only see the frontend, they tend to think that is the bigger part, it isn’t, it is probably only 20% [of the work],” said Ferigolli.
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The engine running Pick n Pay’s application ecosystem is built on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure. These include the asap! mobile app, the Pick n Pay web app, a picking app for in-store runners who prepare customer orders, a driver app, and various other systems controlling core business functions such as marketing and merchandising.
Some parts of Pick n Pay’s e-commerce infrastructure run SAP. Early integration into the SAP system by Bottles gave the start-up the ability to check stock levels at various stores and even report those to customers browsing the app, thereby improving the onling shopping experience. As the application grew, however, other systems and platforms were added.
“[Technology] is everything in our industry (retail) and I cannot find another one right now that is so heavily impacted. It’s not just about online ordering, it’s other things, like implementing AI in our supply chain forecasting models,” said Ferigolli.
Pick n Pay’s first foray into AI was not customer-facing at all, with developers using AI tools to help them develop code from as early as 2021. Asap!’s first customer-facing tool involved using AI to enhance the app’s search capabilities, and over time this grew into AI-driven product recommendations that formed the foundations of Pick n Pay’s “hyper-personalisation” strategy.
As online shopping evolves, improvements in computer vision and agentic AI will lead to home management systems able to replenish items like milk, sugar and cleaning supplies automatically as needed.
Ferigolli said these improvements in online shopping pose interesting questions about how the in-store shopping experience will evolve. As online shopping grows, Ferigolli estimates in-store shopping will still hold around 50% market share in the next decade and this will lead to large retailers adopting a more experiential approach to store layout and design.
“The exciting part is how beautiful the in-store shopping experience is going to become. You can now double the size of the bakery or the butchery and have store attendants to give the kind of experience customers usually get in an independent butchery. For a long time, we have said online is disrupting the stores, but I think it is not disruption but evolution. We are evolving as two parts that are critical the customer,” he said. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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