Woolworths: South Africa’s retail CEO factory

A new guard is taking charge at South African food retail — and Woolworths is central to the story.

Three of the country’s four largest listed grocers now have a chief executive or CEO-in-waiting who came up through the retailer. First, there’s Sam Ngumeni, an internal Woolworths appointment who took over at the company in June, having joined in 1999 as a call centre manager. Then there’s Reeza Isaacs, who spent a decade as finance director at Woolworths before joining Spar as CFO early last year and becoming CEO in March. Spencer Sonn, who spent 26 years at Woolworths, was recently named Sean Summers’ successor at Pick n Pay.

At Woolworths, Ngumeni announced an “organisational reset” that removed two senior executives, including a shift for Sonn who became chief customer officer, and reorganised the group around food as its growth engine.

At Spar, the change was abrupt. Angelo Swartz, an insider and CEO since October 2023, resigned suddenly in February, and the board handed the job to Isaacs.

His diagnosis was blunt: “We allowed our cost base to outgrow revenue for too long,” he told investors as Spar reported headline earnings per share down 55.5%. He has put the profitability of independent retailers, rather than supply volumes, at the centre of the recovery. Last Monday, Spar warned that its 2026 results will be weaker than last year’s. It expects to name a new chair and additional independent directors by early November.

At Pick n Pay, Summers returned in 2023 as the group’s fourth CEO in less than 15 years and has steered a slow recovery, pushing the turnaround target out to 2028. Sonn, who spent five of his 26 Woolworths years running its food division, will inherit that work when he arrives in 2027.

At Woolworths, the question is whether Ngumeni’s food-first reset lifts the languishing fashion business rather than starving it. At Spar, it is whether Isaacs can fix the group’s admitted execution problems before the next earnings season. At Pick n Pay, it is whether Sonn, arriving only next year, gets to complete the turnaround.

Recycling talent

The upshot is that Woolworths’ executive bench is now shaping strategy at two of its biggest competitors.

That should come as no great surprise. Anchor Capital’s Steph Erasmus says Woolworths Foods graduates bring “private-label experience, experience in fresh [food] and an overall focus on superior quality” — a skill set that suits the modern grocery fight.

Independent retail analyst Chris Gilmour is more emphatic. “Any experience that anyone gets from Woolworths is held in incredibly high regard,” he says.

The hiring of Woolworths execs has no doubt been bolstered by a turn towards local talent. Boards that spent a decade paying handsomely for outside turnaround artists with mixed results are now betting on locals, even if that means recycling talent between direct competitors.

On this count, Erasmus sees a parallel with South African retailers that tried to export their management teams abroad and “haven’t really done that well in general”. Basically, a foreign executive arrives unfamiliar with “the supply chain, the labour situation, the culture, the people”, he says.

“I would rather back a South African CEO in South Africa than an Australian one, and I would rather back an Australian CEO in Australia.”

But it’s not just that rivals are luring Woolworths seniors with attractive offers. There are push as well as pull factors at play. Gilmour points to a glass ceiling for talented food people at Woolworths. “The career path for anyone who did well at Woolworths Food was pretty much limited,” he says.

Retail front-runner Shoprite proves a marked contrast. Its leadership has barely changed, with just two CEOs since its founding in 1979. Pieter Engelbrecht, who came up through the business, has run it since 2017.

Its executives are largely absent from the job market, and Erasmus’s explanation is simple: “Why would you leave something that’s winning?” Executives at a thriving company feel they have “a better shot at meeting your targets” and at seeing their share awards vest. “When the team is scrumming the other team 5m backwards, it’s a nice thing to be part of,” he says. “When you’re on the receiving end of that, it’s a lot more difficult.”

Gilmour makes the same point about loyalty. At Shoprite, “anyone who’s at top level has been there since time immemorial” and has ridden the good times and the bad, and done proportionately better as a result. Pick n Pay had a similar loyal core years ago, initially built around Summers.

‘Something in the DNA’

Ask Spar CEO Isaacs why so many of the country’s senior retail executives share a Woolworths pedigree and he doesn’t point to a formal programme. Instead, he says, it comes down to the way the place thinks.

Isaacs spent 10 years at the retailer, arriving from professional services, where he had been the audit partner on the Woolworths account. That meant he knew the company from the outside in before he ever worked there.

“There is definitely something in the DNA that promotes forward thinking, excellence and professionalism,” he says of the company. “The retail skills and insights you pick up are quite phenomenal.”

Part of that, he suggests, is the sheer range of exposure. The food business is about 90% private label and, in his estimation, among the highest-returning food retailers in the world on capital.

Isaacs also found diverse experience on offer. He worked across general merchandise and clothing in South Africa and in Australia through Country Road and sat on the company’s financial services board for 10 years. Factor in the company’s early leadership on sustainability and on transformation and diversity, and you’ve got “a wonderful academy”, he says.

Woolworths does invest in executive and leadership development, he says, but the real education is on the job. “The way thinking gets challenged, and the way people are asked to show up, is very good.”

The group’s global connections matter too, such as the association with Marks & Spencer in the UK. In addition, former Woolworths CEO and chair Simon Susman was for years president of the Intercontinental Group of Department Stores, a leading international retail association, giving local executives a window into how the best operators in the world work.

Isaacs’ own exit from the company, he says, was simply the course of executive life. “People come and go, and sometimes it’s time to try something different. I’ve never regretted my time there.”

He has no plans to transplant the Woolworths playbook into Spar. The two organisations are very different, he says, and he is not about to impose one on the other. Instead, he says he’ll draw on what he has learnt across his whole career, from professional services onwards. “You take leadership, process and ways of working from every aspect of your life and from the people you work with. It doesn’t have to be people senior to you.”

What does this all say for Woolworths? In short, the company trains executives well enough that its competitors want them, but it has not always found room at the top for them to stay. Perhaps Ngumeni’s reset will be judged not only on whether food lifts fashion, but also on whether the next Sonn or Isaacs sees a future at Woolworths rather than elsewhere.