Shoprite's Food Security Index shows hopeful recovery amid ongoing economic challenges in SA

Shoprite’s 2025 Food Security Index climbed to 56.5 in 2024 from a record low of 44.9 the previous year, signalling a return to “relative security.” Anything above 50 means the country is, statistically speaking, more food secure than not.

It’s a hopeful rebound after the pandemic years, but still a long way from the pre-Covid peak of 65.8 in 2019. 

Sanjeev Raghubir, Shoprite’s chief sustainability officer, said the index served as a “proxy for the economy getting better”, as it would signal more people gaining access to food and job stability. 

He said the rise offered “a glimmer of hope in the sense that [the score] can improve, but also in that it can change from collaborative efforts”.

Economics of the plate 

The biggest reason for the rebound was the sharp fall in food inflation, down from 14% in March 2023 to 1.7% by November 2024. That stability helped lift what the index calls “availability”, one of its four core pillars, alongside access, diversity and stability.

Price relief hasn’t cured the deeper economic sickness. With unemployment stuck at 33.2%, millions of households remain locked out of adequate nutrition. 

“If we want to see significant strides and improvements in the food security index, we have to get our economy growing. We have to get our economy on the right track,” Raghubir told Daily Maverick. 

The Food Security Task Force, represented under South Africa’s G20 presidency, warned that persistent food inflation hits low-income households hardest. It called for stronger social protection systems, “such as school feeding and targeted transfers, to ensure dignity and nutrition for vulnerable communities”.

Read more: How Africa could become the world’s leading agricultural powerhouse and food basket

When work is scarce, the dinner table empties, and for wage earners, affordability still decides what and how much they can eat. 

What’s on the table

The index shows a nation eating to survive rather than thrive. Sugars and sugar-rich foods like cereals and condiments are the most consumed food groups, while meats (28.8%) and orange-coloured fruits (19.2%) featured the least on tables. 

Nearly a quarter of households reported poor dietary diversity. This narrow diet sits behind what the index calls the “double burden of malnutrition” — hunger on one end, obesity on the other. 

A staggering 23% of South African children live in severe food poverty. 

This level of food poverty often results in stunting, where children fail to grow to a healthy height for their age. 

“If stunting isn’t addressed,” Raghubir warned, “we face a vicious cycle where stunted individuals may not be able to contribute economically to the country.”

Read more: Confronting SA’s hunger emergency — From constitutional rights to empty plates

Provincially, the divide is just as stark. All provinces except the Eastern Cape had improved index values in 2024. Female-headed households in cities faced the sharpest rise in hunger, while their rural counterparts often managed slightly better by growing vegetables or relying on local food systems.

And we are not alone in this dilemma. A World Health Organization (WHO) report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, also revealed that in most sub-regions of Africa and Western Asia, food security is waning. Many African countries continue to face prolonged food crises, with the WHO’s data estimating that 307 million people across the continent, 20% of the African population, faced hunger in 2024.

Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi all experienced the terrible effects of food pricing volatility, exacerbated by inflationary pressures (or hyperinflation in Zimbabwe), climate shocks and fuel price increases. 

The problem of abundance

South Africa wastes 10 million tonnes of food every year, which is about a third of all it produces, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature. 

SA Harvest was founded to close that gap. The non-profit organisation runs a nationwide logistics network to rescue surplus food from farms, factories and retailers, then delivers it to charities feeding hungry people. 

“The government has the infrastructure to feed; the private sector has the expertise to move food efficiently; and organisations like SA Harvest have the agility and local networks to close the gap between the two,” said Ozzy Nel, SA Harvest’s CEO.

Read more: Food loss and waste — the critical lever missing from South Africa’s climate strategy

South Africa’s food system, the NPO said, was designed for efficiency and profit, not equity. Once food slipped outside the commercial pipeline because of a label error, a dent, or a near sell-by date, there was no national mechanism to rescue it. 

“Edible food is discarded because there’s no viable, safe or affordable path to move it,” the group said. 

The cost of waste

Cold-chain infrastructure is clustered around cities, leaving rural areas, where hunger is most severe, cut off. SA Harvest detailed how moving food across these gaps was costly, seeing that high fuel prices, load shedding and poor roads made refrigerated transport so expensive that it could exceed the value of the food itself. 

Even when businesses wanted to donate, the legal and fiscal framework made it difficult. 

“South Africa lacks a Good Samaritan law to protect food donors from liability,” the NPO said, adding that donating food was taxed the same way as selling it. This meant that it could be cheaper for a company to destroy edible food than to give it away. 

SA Harvest noted that fixing these rules would redirect millions of tonnes of surplus foods to hungry households. It wanted food rescue recognised as part of national infrastructure alongside VAT exemptions on food donations and the integration of redistribution targets into the long-overdue National Food and Nutrition Security Plan (2024-2029). 

Read more: On landfills, butternut and buffets — Zero Waste Summit

The previous plan, covering 2018 to 2024, expired last year. The Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development is now leading development of the new one, but it has not been finalised or released yet. 

Lebogang Botsheleng, the acting deputy director-general for food security and agrarian reform, said the government's agricultural strategy sought stronger public-private cooperation to create food reserves that could cushion vulnerable groups during shocks.

Affording the basics

Shoprite’s approach tackled hunger from the opposite end by preventing prices from pushing people out of the market altogether. The retailer’s R5 loaf of brown bread, frozen at that price since 2016, was a reflection of this. 

Read more: Shoprite’s #ThePowerOfR5 campaign highlights consumer affordability and accessibility

Raghubir said that about 21.7 million loaves were sold last year, alongside 1.8 million R5 products each week, ranging from deli meals to toiletries. 

“We’re always looking at opportunities to be more efficient, to do things quicker, faster, and with less waste,” he said. “And when you do that, you’re able to then provide products and goods at a more affordable price.”

Bridging the divide

Both Shoprite and SA Harvest show that action is possible, yet both are held back by bureaucracy, slow decision making, and unclear incentives that keep food from reaching those who need it most.

Nel said the answer lay in connecting capacity. 

“This is not about shifting responsibility but rather connecting capacity. When the government, business and civil society align their strengths, the right to food stops being an aspiration and starts becoming operational.”

SA Harvest proposes a three-pronged alignment: supplementing diets in schools with rescued fresh produce, sharing regional cold-chain infrastructure, and using digital data systems to map surplus and need in real time.

One of the key recommendations from the index is the need for a national nutrition plan. Shoprite’s Index highlights the importance of the National School Nutrition Programme, which now reaches 78% of public school learners. Raghubir praised the improvement but said government efficiency remained critical to sustaining it.

Public trust, he added, leant toward the private sector. Citing the Edelman Trust Barometer, he noted that “from a competency perspective, there is a lot more competency within the private sector than there is within the government”. He also expressed concern that the government often duplicated work instead of using data already available from private research and indices.

Marietjie Brown, sustainability and government affairs lead for Africa, Middle East and Turkey for logistics specialist CHEP, points out that during the 2024/2025 financial year, FoodForward SA distributed 83 million meals, reaching 935,000 people daily through a network of 2,500 beneficiary organisations. All food items were transported using CHEP’s reusable assets, allowing FoodForward SA to minimise its environmental footprint and enhance efficiency throughout its distribution network.

“The fight against hunger in southern Africa is complex, but it is not insurmountable. Tackling it requires more than agricultural reform or government intervention, it demands a unified, cross-sector commitment to strengthening every link in the food supply chain. From farmers to logistics providers, from packaging producers to purpose-driven NGOs, each has a role to play in ensuring food reaches those who need it most,” Brown said.

Read more: State’s interdepartmental strategy to tackle hunger hampers South Africans’ right to food — report

Looking ahead, Raghubir wants to see the government playing a more active role in the school feeding schemes and being more efficient in their execution. 

“The needle can move significantly if there’s collaborative work between government, business, civil society and communities.”

Shoprite’s 2025 Food Security Index reflects a country where economic fragility, waste, and willpower coexist uneasily. Raghubir envisions a future defined by “stability in accessibility, in affordability and in diet diversity”.

That future will depend on whether policy can move beyond planning to real implementation and treating hunger as an infrastructure problem. DM