Shoprite has acquired Vida e Caffè, South Africa's largest speciality coffee chain with more than 400 stores, and taken a majority stake in R&A Cellular, an Mpumalanga-based device rental and merchant platform with over 15,000 terminals in the informal market.

Both were announced with the group's results for the year to 28 June. Neither deal was categorisable under JSE listing requirements and no prices were disclosed.

The results give the deals context. Group merchandise sales from continuing operations rose 7.2% to R270.8-billion and diluted headline earnings per share climbed 12.2% to 1,527.4 cents. The unusual part is how that was achieved. Internal selling price inflation across Shoprite's South African supermarkets ran at 0.8%, well below the 3.9% official rate for food and non-alcoholic beverages, with outright deflation at Shoprite and Usave.

The group sold 110 million R5 products during the year. So volume, not price, drove the growth. On the acquisitions, Vida started as one Cape Town store in 2001 and now trades in Ghana, Mauritius, Zambia, Eswatini, Botswana, Namibia and Angola, across high street, forecourt, drive-thru and in-store formats including SPAR and Exclusive Books.

R&A Cellular sells point-of-sale hardware and prepaid products to spaza shops and micro-businesses, covering airtime, electricity, data, lottery and card payments. That deal remains subject to regulatory approval.

BusinessTech reported chief executive Pieter Engelbrecht's view that Vida's demographically diverse customer base and range of store formats give the group a platform for future growth. Bloomberg reported the dividend beat analyst estimates and framed both deals as buying exposure to quick-service restaurants and to payments technology. Moneyweb covered the R&A transaction and the group's stated aim of embedding financial services into township and peri-urban retailers.

Look at what the two deals have in common. Neither adds a supermarket. Vida buys formats Shoprite does not operate, forecourts, drive-thrus and counters inside other retailers' stores. R&A buys a way into 15,000 spaza tills the group will never own. Both are about reaching the customer somewhere other than a Shoprite aisle, which is the same logic that made Sixty60 the engine behind the market cap.

The informal side is the one to watch. R&A puts Shoprite into the same payments layer where Lesaka already runs 90,000 terminals, and both are chasing merchants who buy their stock from wholesalers rather than from Checkers.

Owning the till in a shop that competes with you is a reasonable place to be.

You might also like our piece on how Pixie Smart Chat handles measurement inside Sixty60, what the surge in South African M&A says about deal appetite, and what the Big Mac Index rand figure says about local pricing.

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