There is a queue at Food Lover’s Market in Greendale, Harare, that tells you everything you need to know about the future of retail in Zimbabwe. It is not a queue born of scarcity, not the reluctant shuffle of people waiting because there is no alternative, but a genuine crowd of willing shoppers, six days a week, in one of the toughest retail markets on the continent. The car park overflows. The expansion into a larger, better-equipped space was not a vanity project; it was a survival response to demand that the original building simply could not contain.
Meanwhile, up the road, two other Food Lover’s outlets — the ones in Avondale and Borrowdale operated under the umbrella of OK Zimbabwe — have shut their doors for good. OK Zimbabwe itself, once the undisputed anchor of Zimbabwean formal retail, has spent the past two years lurching between crisis points, eventually requiring a US$20 million rights offer just to remain operational, with ambitions to raise as much as US$30 million in total to stabilise the business.
The contrast is not incidental. It is instructive.
To understand why smaller is beginning to outperform bigger, you first have to appreciate what big actually costs.
Zimbabwe’s retail sector was valued at roughly US$2,5 billion in 2025. That sounds like a healthy number until you examine who is actually capturing value within it. The formal chains, OK Zimbabwe and TM Pick n Pay, together hold an estimated 60% to 70% of the urban formal retail market. But formal retail is not where most Zimbabweans shop. Informal tuckshops account for 70% to 80% of rural and low-income trade, and the informal economy as a whole accounts for 76% of GDP according to ZimStat. A sector worth US$2,5 billion on paper is, in practice, one where the formal players are fighting over a shrinking slice.
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Running a chain supermarket in this environment is not simply difficult; it is structurally punishing. OK Zimbabwe’s operating costs doubled in a single financial year, driven by surging energy bills, generator dependency, rising utility tariffs and National Employment Council-mandated wage increases. The company’s half-year US dollar revenue then collapsed by 84% to just US$28 million by September 2025.
Pick n Pay’s South African parent wrote down its entire investment in TM Supermarkets to zero, citing currency volatility and hyperinflationary conditions. These are not companies that made a few poor decisions. They are companies whose operating model was designed for an economy that Zimbabwe has not been for some time.
The informal sector has understood this far longer than the boardrooms have. Tuckshops operate with a structural cost advantage of 30% to 50% over formal retailers, primarily because they are not bound by VAT obligations, corporate tax, or exchange rate regulations.
A customer who needs cooking oil or washing powder can often find it cheaper three streets from the nearest chain store, sold from a room with no overheads and no compliance burden. That is not a market distortion to be corrected, it is a market signal to be read.
Nor is this dynamic unique to Zimbabwe. Boston Consulting Group found that across Africa, consumers buy more than 70% of their food and household goods from small, independent shops. In Kenya, that figure is 77%; in Nigeria, small neighbourhood grocers remain the dominant channel by volume despite the presence of well-resourced chains.
The African consumer does not default to the supermarket. Convenience, proximity and price win, and they have always won. What Zimbabwe is experiencing is not an aberration. It is the continent’s retail reality arriving with particular force.
Food Lover’s Greendale did not set out to disrupt anything. It started, in its earliest incarnation as Honeydew Market, as a farm stall on a 12-acre smallholding along Greendale Avenue in 1982. The Willcox family, passionate about fresh produce and rooted in the land, built something from the ground up over four decades. The business grew not by replication, but by depth.
Today, it carries the remarkable distinction of being the third busiest branch of the Food Lover’s franchise across all of Africa, out of 136 branches continent-wide. It is not a flagship in Johannesburg or Cape Town. Attempts to explain this through geography miss the point.
Research by Money & Moves, conducted with Injecta Analytics in 2025, mapped upper-income households within a two-kilometre radius of Honeydew Shopping Centre and found nothing that gave Greendale a decisive locational edge. Spar, TM Pick n Pay, and Bon Marché all operate in comparable catchments nearby. The customers who fill the Greendale car park are not all local. Many drive past those alternatives on purpose.
To read full article, visit: www.theindependent.co.zw
Muhamba is a business analyst, market researcher and the AMH Group chair’s executive assistant. — valentinem@alphamedia.co.zw