There is a common temptation to describe South Africa’s spaza shop sector as small, scrappy, and hard to measure. The data says otherwise.
Trade Intelligence puts the informal FMCG market at R207 billion, growing 5.2% in 2024¹, spread across roughly 150,000 stores¹ and serving 11 million regular shoppers¹.
GG Alcock of Kasinomics, drawing on granular township research, takes a narrower cut and puts spaza shops alone at R190 billion across 100,000 outlets².
Standard Bank’s inaugural Township Informal Economy Report (October 2025) frames the wider picture: the full township informal economy sits somewhere between R900 billion and R1 trillion³, accounting for 19.5% of total employment in Q4 2024³.
Geographically, the sector is concentrated but not confined to one province. Stats SA’s SESE 2023 survey (released March 2025) shows Gauteng leading with 28.9% of informal businesses, followed by KwaZulu-Natal at 16.8% and Limpopo at 15.8%⁴.
Premises are equally revealing: 49% of operators run their shops from homes or garages, 25% from streets, 11% from commercial premises, and 8% from industrial sites⁴. It’s a sector built in living rooms and driveways instead of malls.
The question of who owns these stores became politically charged after a wave of foodborne illness incidents in 2024 triggered a national registration drive.
Between July 2024 and February 2025, municipalities received 82,924 applications nationally, of which 30,617 (~ 37%) came from foreign nationals⁵. The approval rate told a different story: only 15,528 applications were approved overall (19%), with just 2,586 foreign nationals succeeding (17% of their applicants)⁵. In Gauteng, the numbers were more stark, of 17,617 applications, 7,107 were from foreign nationals, but only 128 received approval, a 1.8% approval rate⁵. The City of Tshwane received 4,222 applications in total, with only 192 meeting the registration criteria⁵.
On ownership, the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation’s survey of 6,000 microenterprises found foreign nationals operating more than 60% of spaza shops in many areas, with Somalis accounting for 58% and Ethiopians 25% of foreign ownership⁵.
Government’s response was the Spaza Shop Support Fund, launched in Soweto on 8 April 2025 by Ministers Parks Tau and Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams⁶. Administered jointly by the NEF and SEDFA, the fund offers up to R40,000 in stock grants, up to R50,000 in blended grant-and-loan packages, and up to R100,000 for training⁶.
Progress has been slow. As at 27 October 2025, only 109 shops had received support, against 10,993 applications started; R52 million had been disbursed with a further R117 million pending municipal licence verification⁶. All 109 approved beneficiaries are South African citizens⁶.
While the government works through its disbursement pipeline, the private sector has moved faster. Independent wholesalers like Trade Centre, KitKat, Devland, and Elite Star Trading underpin a formal independent trade book worth R259 billion (2023 baseline)⁷.
Tiger Brands had its products in 71,000 general trade stores by end-2024, against a five-year target of 130,000 stores⁸. BevCo has seeded thousands of branded coolers across the channel, partnering with The Brand and Beverage Company. And Yebo Fresh, the WhatsApp-based B2B ordering platform acquired by Smollan in December 2024 with an estimated 2025 revenue of $18.6 million⁹, has become the clearest example of what digitising the supply chain to spaza shops can look like at scale.
The operating economics are unforgiving, but the addressable volume is enormous. A typical spaza shop turns over R30,000 to R80,000 per month³. Eighty-five percent of all informal businesses report annual turnover below the R1 million VAT threshold³, which means they are structurally invisible to systems that rely on tax data.
The brands, banks, and logistics players that can work around that invisibility, through observed cash flow, WhatsApp ordering, and route-to-market density, are the ones building the infrastructure of the next decade of South African retail.