Nice day {{ FIRSTNAME }}? Burger King is hooking AI up to workers’ headsets to check if they say please and thank you enough. ‘Cos apparently humans don’t know? 🤷♀️
In This Open Letter
Big Easy: Meet the team helping SA find the best basket price.
Local: Easier dismissals in SA & saying goodbye to Showmax.
Global: Downdetector’s $1bn deal & African phone from China.
Tech Jobs: Machine learning jobs, back- & front-end & more.
Better Business: When is AI good (and bad) for your brand?
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TRENDING NOW
Your Weekly Grocery-Run Just Got Way Smarter
30 million SA adults rely on our R1.5 trillion retail sector every month, but 95% of that still happens in person across multiple outlets – this platform helps them find the best deals at every store…
Seeing SA suburbs abuzz with on-demand delivery scooters, you’d think everyone’s getting groceries delivered. But 95% of fast-moving consumer goods are still bought in-store.
And most peeps are still juggling a portfolio of four different retailers.
Spoilt for choice, or are we?
Annual inflation is rising, with the average household grocery basket up 75%+ from R3‘073.22 in Feb 2019 to R5’383.81 in Feb 2026.
And as SA shoppers are forced to hunt for bargains and specials on food and grocery items, single-store loyalty has to make room for carefully planned price-based shopping like never before.
It’s sparked a rise in the use of digital catalogue services in SA, but that’s just trading physical browsing with a new kind of digital cognitive load – it’s the booking.com problem, but for groceries.
SA needs a smarter aggregation option for when you’re buying R2’000 worth of essentials every Monday…
The local smart grocery aggregator
We Need Milk is a multi-retailer grocery aggregator that gives shoppers a single source of truth – so you don’t need 5 apps, just build one list, and the platform does the heavy lifting.
It compares your specific basket across every major local retailer (Spar, Checkers, Pick n Pay, and Woolworths) and tells you exactly where your basket is available at the best price.
But it’s more than cost-saving: We Need Milk helps you source specific items (if you’re more health- or sustainability-conscious) or the fastest delivery window. It even has 65k recipes integrated, so you can shop by meal or ingredient list, too.
Right place, right time
Founder Arjan van den Berg told us he didn’t initially plan to launch in South Africa (he’s from the Netherlands, but been living here for 9 years). Seeing the online grocery market boom, though, gave him a gap to roll out the product and gather immediate feedback from a market where adoption is growing fast.
The tech is built right here in SA, and they’re currently working on a full AI agent within WhatsApp to let users dictate their shopping list in-chat.
They're currently in talks with all of SA’s major retailers to let you order directly on the We Need Milk app. And Arjan dreams of one day including smaller retailers – your favourite butcher, baker, candlestick-maker and the works might be on the We Need Milk app on Android and iOS soon.
We’re watching this space…
Have your say…
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IN SHORT
Easing you into the weekend…
💪 Gettin’ Down To Business. The new SA Labour Law Amendment Bill will (amongst a whole host of changes) simplify probation rules and provide a two-year bargaining council exemption for new small businesses. See how it de-risks hiring for SA businesses.
🔌 Is It Me Or Is It The Internet? Ookla's Speedtest and Downdetector have both been acquired by Accenture in a deal worth a cool $1.2 billion in cold, hard cash. The deal was announced by digital media and internet company Ziff Davis, in what looks to be a brand consolidation play.
📺 Showmax Signs Off. MultiChoice will shut down Showmax after heavy losses, with Canal+ shifting focus to its own streaming platform. Subscribers can keep watching for now while the service is phased out.
🤖 African Mobile AI From China. Chinese TECNO Mobile’s updated AI model combines language models from Deepseek and Gemini with an on-device chatbot called Ella that can recognise 100 African languages, along with hundreds more from around the world.
📊 Brand Clarity Secured. Stellenbosch’s Sonic Fund and Sonic Trader needed to serve very different audiences without brand dilution. So DoubleShift built two distinct brand systems, giving both the clarity to scale globally with sharper investor and customer traction.*
* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.
WHAT YOU SAID
Stok and roll…
Yesterday, we showed you how Stokvel Academy's helping digitise informal savings clubs in SA, asking what digitised stokvels would unlock the most. Most say bigger investment potential…
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💳 Access to financial services (14%)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📊 Better transparency (23%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🚀 Bigger investment potential (44%)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤔 Not sure it's necessary (8%)
Your 2 cents…
"Transparency breeds trust in the system and the people/members."
Absolutely, Morne! And the social angle brings the trust layer. Love it. 🤝✨
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BEYOND THE NEWSLETTER
The right way to use AI for your brand
We asked one of SA’s top tech brand experts what you should and shouldn’t use AI for to build a trusted brand…
Don’t miss all the extra operator interviews and insights content we do on our social channels — come enjoy the vibez.
AROUND THE WEB
Have some fun…
🎥 Tool to Try: Gloomin is a lightweight Chrome tool for quick screen recordings.
🧫 That’s Interesting: Microbes on the International Space Station have mutated into a distinct strain that’s not seen on Earth.
🌊 Next Level: Check out this Brazilian waterfall exploding after heavy rain.
🏎️ Hack: A cool guide to what’s inside a Formula 1 car.
💰 Wow Site: How Rich Is a Billionaire, Really? is an interactive scroll that visualises just how massive a billion dollars actually is.
