With 1 in 5 households reporting weekly hunger, and a record 7.2 million unemployed people in South Africa, Shoprite has intensified its efforts to provide customers with products that are affordable and accessible.

While many have come to disregard the R5 coin’s purchasing power, Shoprite continues to look for ways to stretch it even further, by selling food and other essentials that require just a single coin.

The first of these was Shoprite’s 600g in-house brown bakery bread, which still retails for only R4.99 - the same price as when it first launched in April 2016. Over the last five years, there has been zero inflation on this product - and stores have sold more than 266 million loaves.

In 2017 Shoprite introduced discounted deli meals so that hard-pressed consumers with only R5 in their pocket can afford to eat. Just in the last 12 months, stores have served more than 23 million meals to customers for R5 or less, with the three most popular being:

●     large igwinya (vetkoek)

●     chicken hot dog

●     fried egg & tomato sandwich

Now Shoprite is expanding its R5 offering to include sanitary pads for women and girls - items that it believes is a basic human right.

Manufactured locally, the pack contains eight individually wrapped maxi pads, and are available exclusively from Shoprite and Usave supermarkets for just R5.

On top of these R5 initiatives, the Shoprite Group continues to look for other ways to help its customers save money: the Xtra Savings programme has saved consumers more than R2.1 billion between July and December 2020.

And since the start of the national lockdown, the Shoprite Group has intensified its food security efforts, donating more than R100 million in surplus food to organisations spearheading several critical initiatives around the country.