(Photo: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg via Getty Images) 
When Pick n Pay’s newest head of digital operations talks about retail, her energy is unmistakable.
“Retail is something that gives me a lot of adrenaline,” Kerry Janse van Rensburg told Daily Maverick. “It’s such a challenge. It’s always exciting. Everything’s always moving.”
She’s arrived at a company that is going through the retail equivalent of a caffeine detox. After years of financial strain, bad debt and too many stores chasing too few customers, the grocer has hit reset.
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The turnaround plan – called “Back to Basics” (because corporate euphemisms love understatement) – is meant to fix the core business, shrink what doesn’t work, and rebuild trust with shoppers who’ve been drifting elsewhere.
With the retailer in the middle of an attempted turnaround, Janse van Rensburg’s mission is to merge tech, data, and customer insight into one connected ecosystem that makes PnP shopping feel seamless again.
Independent retail analyst Chris Gilmour that PnP faces an “uphill task ahead of them”.
Speaking of PnP’s data project, he said: “They have to. They have no choice in the matter… it’s no longer a nice-to-have, it’s essential.”
Breaking the silos
When Janse van Rensburg joined the company in September, she found an organisation full of talent but fragmented in execution. “Everything felt very siloed,” she said. “Innovation is about bringing all the pieces together so they don’t operate in silos. What you need to aim for is one connected engine driving customer satisfaction and business growth.”
Her task is to make PnP’s online store, Smart Shopper programme and physical aisles finally behave like they belong to the same ecosystem. “The customer doesn’t see it as online and in store,” she said. “They see it as one. They see it as Pick n Pay.”
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It’s a deceptively simple goal for a sprawling retail operation that seeks to achieve the same kind of integration some of their competitors have already mastered.
The work has already begun. In May 2025, the company launched its revamped PnP app – a single hub for groceries, rewards and delivery.
Enrico Ferigolli, who heads the online division, called it “the biggest moment for Pick n Pay Online since we launched asap! in 2020.”
The platform is faster and smarter, with AI-powered recommendations and slicker checkout features.
“It’s designed to make it easier for the customer to just shop and check out and do their thing,” Janse van Rensburg said. “We are all super busy and we don’t have time to fiddle.”
Data is the new discount
An important enabler for this strategy is Smart Shopper, PnP’s loyalty programme. It is one of the company’s digital tools that has endured since its launch more than a decade ago, one that Gilmour noted was based on Tesco’s model.
“The Smart Shopper data is gold for us,” Janse van Rensburg said. “It is that unique identifier between online and offline.” This means understanding who scrolls online but checks out in store, who shops on payday versus mid-month, and what makes customers come back.
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“We are giving [customers] personalised offers and hyperpersonalised messages and being in the moment with them, which AI will help us do,” she said.“If you have loyal customers and your price goes up a little bit, […] if they’re really loyal and you have a good relationship with them, they’ll keep coming back.”
Gilmour cautions that relevance alone won’t fix the gap. “Pick n Pay are great followers, not necessarily innovators,” he said, recalling an old industry line. Competitors such as Shoprite have turned their data into a profit engine, he said, which is a capability that PnP still has to build.
From agencies to the aisle
Janse van Rensburg’s path to PnP didn’t start in retail. About 15 years ago, she was working in agencies, watching the digital tide rising. “I said to my husband, digital is going to be the way forward,” she said. “And I had absolutely no experience in digital.”
After a stint in insurance at Clientele, she joined Makro “smack bang in the middle of Black Friday”, which she remembers as a baptism by chaos. It hooked her.
“Retail really is something that gives me a lot of adrenaline,” she said. “It’s such a challenge. It’s always exciting. Everything’s always moving.”
Pixels and profit margins
PnP’s digital revival is happening alongside a physical turnaround. Returning CEO Sean Summers is on a mission to rebuild the company’s muscle.
“Pick n Pay’s store reset programme is a key part of our turnaround strategy,” he said. “We’re moving away from scale for its own sake, focusing instead on a smaller, more profitable, higher-quality store base.”
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The online division has become a vital part of that strategy. “South Africans are seeking better value than ever before,” PnP’s head of innovation, Vincent Viviers, said. “They want to save now, while also building up rewards they can use later.”
Gilmour said these changes are necessary but long overdue. In the 1980s, PnP led the pack with innovations such in-store scanning, and now it’s the one racing to catch up.
PnP’s online sales jumped nearly 50% in the past year, according to its 2025 financial statements, but the company still trails Shoprite’s Sixty60 delivery model – which Gilmour notes is one of the few profitable home-delivery services in global retail.
Janse van Rensburg and her team are digging through PnP’s technology stack to modernise what’s under the hood. “The digital journey is going to be a long road, but I’m looking forward to seeing my strategy come alive and be successful,” she said.
That optimism may meet the harsh math of retail transformation. Gilmour said the challenge remains steep, even under Summers, whom he described as “a retail genius” and warned that time and Summers’ succession are not on PnP’s side. DM