Checkers Sixty60 grew sales to R25.5 billion in Shoprite’s 2026 financial year, and Zulzi, the small technology and delivery company that built the original platform, says it still helps run it. Shoprite’s results for the 52 weeks to 28 June 2026 show the on-demand service adding a record R6.6 billion in sales, up almost 35% on the year before, according to SAP’s coverage of the results. The service accounted for 11.1% of Supermarkets RSA sales, as Investing.com’s summary of the results shows.
Sources differ slightly on the exact growth rate: Bizcommunity gives 34.5% and Investing.com gives 34.7%. Both agree on the R25.5 billion total.
What the results show
Group sales rose 7.2% to R270.8 billion, with trading profit up 8.4% to R16.2 billion, based on the Investing.com summary. Bizcommunity estimated that Sixty60 accounted for more than a third of the group’s sales growth. In the first half, Sixty60 sales grew 34.6% to R11.9 billion, well ahead of the 7.1% growth in the broader Supermarkets RSA business.
Shoprite chief executive Pieter Engelbrecht told SAP that rivals can copy the platform, but catching up will take “time and money”. He said Shoprite owns the Sixty60 code it runs on, so it pays no licence fees for it. Over three years, the retailer spent R22.6 billion on digital technology, supply chain upgrades and store expansion, and it plans to spend R7.7 billion in the coming year.
Where Zulzi fits in
Zulzi’s founder, Vutlharhi “Donald” Valoyi, grew up in Ntshuxi village near Giyani in Limpopo, and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2007 with a BSc in Applied Mathematics. He worked as a software engineer and moved into technical leadership at First National Bank in 2011, then left to start Zulzi in 2013, BusinessTech reported.
Zulzi began as an e-commerce platform for students, with delivery of books and electronics within an hour. Checkers approached it for grocery delivery technology, and the partnership began in 2018. Sixty60 launched in November 2019, just before the Covid-19 lockdown, in select areas of Sandton, Johannesburg and Cape Town.
In an interview with SAP in September 2024, Zulzi said it built the original Checkers platform and was still maintaining it. That covers the customer app, the in-store app, dashboards, the order allocation engine and the integration with SAP point-of-sale systems. It said more than 34 engineers, project managers and quality assurance staff came from Zulzi. Valoyi said Checkers was interested partly because it had no legacy systems.
Valoyi told SAP that “Sixty60 has been a huge success and an example of what we can do when we work together.” A radio interview summary from ECR quotes him saying Zulzi “still plays a major role in maintaining Sixty60”, and TechCentral also describes Zulzi as still supporting the service.
Shoprite describes the origin differently, and the two accounts are not necessarily in conflict. BusinessTech noted that Sixty60 was developed in-house by Shoprite’s ShopriteX digital unit, with external partners including Zulzi. Shoprite has not, in anything we found, put a figure on Zulzi’s contribution or commented on the size of its current role.
Zulzi’s own delivery business
Zulzi also runs its own service. In 2024 it said it processed more than 5,000 orders a day from its own dark stores in Johannesburg North, Pretoria and Centurion, with 300 drivers and an average delivery time of 17 minutes. It said it was growing at 80% year on year. The same account says it delivers liquor and pharmaceuticals from seven dark stores and operates daily from 06:00 to 23:00. Those figures are from 2024 and may have changed.
The scale of Sixty60 makes the origin story relevant for the wider market. The same SAP article reported that Sixty60 sales grew 58.1% in the year to June 2024, and that by December 2023 the app had more than 4.5 million downloads and served 505 stores. Growth of almost 35% in 2026 is therefore slower in percentage terms than two years earlier, though the service is far larger.
For related coverage, see our report on Shoprite adding airtime, data and vouchers to the Sixty60 app, our story on Shoprite naming cybersecurity as its top risk, and our piece on Shoprite CEO Pieter Engelbrecht’s pay.
