Why People, Not Just Technology, Are Driving Naivas’ Growth Across East Africa | WRC 2026

Hello, everyone.

This is omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton and I am coming to you live from the World Retail Congress, Day two in Berlin from the Vusion Podcast studio.

Now, joining me is Andreas Von Pilecki, the CEO of nyvus.

Andreas, it's great to have you.

Nice to.

Thanks for being here.

I'm glad to be here.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So it turns out, omnitalk fans, I'm gonna get to Andreas background here in a second.

But it turns out that actually we went to business school together.

We did overlap for two years, the.

Exact same two years.

And we found that out.

We didn't know each.

We were trying to see if we could recall each other's face.

We couldn't really, but here we are.

So it's funny how paths cross, but.

So let's start off.

Tell us about your background and also about Naivas too.

Absolutely.

So look, I actually started my career off in private equity.

Okay.

So I invested in consumer businesses for the best part of 15 years.

Oh, wow.

And I never really ran a business before, but I figured with an MBA and having worked in private equity, how hard could it be to.

To run a business?

Little.

Little did I know.

Especially a grocery retailer.

Yes, Smartest business.

But I was with an emerging markets fund and we were looking at assets in East Africa and I came across Naivas and was really intrigued by the business.

Very much focused on bottom of the pyramid grocery retail.

Very well executed.

And one thing led to another and I joined the business.

At the time, we were the number three grocery retailer in Kenya.

Very small, around 30 stores.

We now have 114.

We're the number one by some margin and have really expanded, but I think expanded in a really impactful way for two reasons.

Yeah.

One, we employ over 12,000 staff.

So in a market where employment is not easy to come by, we actually have a massive impact on our staff and those families.

And we spend a lot of time investing in them and developing the staff.

I can come back to that later if you like.

But more importantly, it's bringing affordable groceries to the market, which, with a more efficient supply chain, investing in the quality and the ranging and ultimately also in the pricing is something that we can do.

So we've become a very popular, in fact, a household name in the market.

Yeah, so.

So if I read between the lines, was the market kind of underserved then, for the most part, in terms of access to groceries?

And that type of thing is certainly more developed than other African markets, but still underserved.

Correct.

I mean, Even today, penetration of modern trade.

So grocery retailers that you'd recognize is about 20, 25%.

So most of the market is still informal.

Okay.

But we've sort of been on the vanguard on of leading that rev.

Okay, got it.

And yeah, so let's come back to the idea you said about investing in employees too.

Tell us more about that.

How do you do that?

So it's a market where employment is.

Or unemployment is reasonably high, which means we can attract quite a lot of graduates.

So highly skilled people.

Interesting.

But of course, they're joining us in entry level jobs.

We see that as a real opportunity for two reasons.

One, we can bring really talented people into the business, but stacking shelves is probably not why they went to university.

So investing in them and really upskilling them is a great way to have impact for them, for their families.

But actually it's a great way for us to get talented resource into the business.

Yeah, that reminds me, when I was, when I was running Target stores, my wife would come in and she'd see me bagging groceries after my Harvard mba.

But yeah, no, it's very true.

But how do you keep them motivated then?

Once you get them in the job, what do you do to keep them motivated?

So we spend a lot of time, first of all around benefits.

So we look to pay more than the average player in the market, both in terms of salary, but also other benefits, including bonus.

So everybody in the business has access to a performance bonus.

And we're really proud of that and sort of led the market.

But most importantly, it's making training programs available to our staff and then promoting them from within.

So over 99% of our promotions are internal.

We recruit externally very rarely.

And I think that really signals to staff that if they invest in themselves, if they partake in the training, they have a huge opportunity ahead of them.

Got it.

So you give them a career ladder.

So.

Absolutely.

We talk a lot about that, actually.

Jobs versus or careers versus jobs, rather.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm curious, what was the biggest?

You kind of made a joke of it, you know, as you kind of took over a grocery retailer.

What was the biggest?

Like, do you remember, like, was there an aha moment or what was the biggest epiphany you had when you kind of were sitting in the chair going, oh, my God.

This is a lot more different than I probably expected.

I mean, so, so many.

Right.

Because moving from a spreadsheet and a boardroom sort of giving instructions to a business where there's just so many thousands of interactions that have to work.

Right.

Even unlike a manufacturing business, which I might have invested in right here, it's a 247 business, literally, where a lot of small things have got to fall into place.

Right.

And seeing the hard work that people actually put in on the front line.

Yeah.

Made me realize that things are a little different at the coalface.

Yeah, yeah.

I was joking.

I was joking somebody this way.

It's so funny.

So that I was joking with somebody literally this morning.

Just talking about running a warehouse versus running, running a retailer.

And how much more complicated is.

I think.

Yeah.

Because your customers don't walk through your warehouse while you're trying to do your work.

It's a real fact.

All right, what brings you to a World Retail Congress?

Look, I think it's important.

Obviously we've got to get a lot of things right in the market, but it's really important, I think, to be open minded and see what's happening on the global stage.

We look to lead in the market, but we also look to bring a lot of innovation from other places to.

To Kenya.

I think one of the benefits that we have is that we can leverage a lot of what's been done elsewhere.

And so World Retail Congress is a great place to sort of bring that all together, go to different sessions and pick up some helpful tips.

Yeah.

I mean, that's personally why I like coming here.

I get to talk to you about how grocery works in East Africa.

So I'm curious, like, how is grocery different than the United States or even Europe in East Africa?

I'm pleased to say, actually, if you walked into one of our stores, you'd find it very, very similar.

What is it in terms of the experience that we've created, the fit outs that we use, but importantly, and there's players, I think in the U.S. whole Foods and the like, we have a huge focus on fresh produce.

So when you walk into one of our stores, you'll see an abundance of really high quality fresh produce.

Okay.

I personally like that visual.

I think it's a great visual.

Visual, yeah.

Is that right?

You guys, you guys lean into the.

Visual of fresh 100%.

Because drives frequency, but it also drives loyalty.

And who doesn't see, who doesn't like to see an abundance of fresh produce?

Right.

In terms of the grocery shop.

Yeah, yeah.

Really nice color blocked wet rack can make all the difference in the world.

100%.

100%.

All right, so you mentioned, you know, let's talk what's.

We're also, you know, the other focus of this Conference is technology and staying and keeping pace on it, you know, and grocery really is the crucible for a lot of technological innovation throughout the world right now.

So I'm curious, what, what's on your technology roadmap to improve the business in 2026 and where do you think the low hanging fruit is going to be for you?

So two, two important topics.

Okay.

One is our own data.

I mean, again, these are acronyms or terms you'll hear everyone talking about and in particular customer data.

So one of the things we're looking to bring to both our buying team and our store teams is a much deeper understanding.

We have three and a half million loyalty card members, so we have a very, very rich seam of data.

But historically we've probably not mined that as much in terms of really getting insights and so bringing that to the front line to educate our staff around what our customers are doing and what they're not doing to help us better arrange and to help us better serve them in store is one big area.

Okay.

The other one, I won't surprise you, is AI.

But that's really.

You never know.

Yeah, but that's really around how can we remove some of the mundane tasks that could be around demand planning that could be around planogramming.

Right.

Which first of all are low value add activities in terms of a human interaction.

But also a lot of our staff would probably like to move more to the insights decision making piece.

And so using AI to help us make those decisions drive the insights is a.

Is another key focus.

So kind of that productivity plus idea.

I was hearing that.

Yes.

Yesterday from Scott Price of DFI Group too.

He was taking this.

He's interested in taking a similar approach.

You guys planogram as well.

You do?

Yeah.

Wow, interesting.

Have you always done that or is that a discipline that, you know, kind of you developed or brought in over time?

It's a discipline we've brought in over the last 10 years, but it's a, it's a key focus for us.

And, and I think also spending time with the teams on the science behind it.

Okay.

To ultimately grow a basket.

All right, great.

Yeah, there's a lot of value to it.

What other major trends in the grocery industry are you keeping an eye on from your executive chair?

So one we've sort of touched on, which is around how can we create more experience in our stores through our staff.

So removing the mundane tasks and turning our staff into selling agents, really serving customers.

Right.

So almost flipping them 180 degrees away from stocking the Shelf to interacting with the customer.

That's important for two reasons from our perspective.

One, obviously it drives sales, but also in terms of managing our cost base, really important that we're increasing that sort of productivity component.

Right.

And the other one, and look, different markets evolved at different rates is probably our private label evolution.

Okay.

We're now at a scale where our brand is really meaningful in the market and are turning that into not just the storefront, but also the products that we sell customers is.

Is a big trend that we're looking to really push.

Got it.

Is there a third element too, to the first one you talked about in terms of, like the actual engagement of the employees?

I feel like.

I feel like as you start to use AI to take a lot of the mundane work off the plate, you should in theory have more engaged employees too.

Do you see that as a potential byproduct?

100%.

And I think what's so interesting in retail, and I'll say in a panel yesterday, I think retail can sometimes be a career that's sort of looked down upon a bit versus other.

And.

And I think actually when you think about AI, retail is a wonderful place.

Right.

Whether that's around the actual selling and learning selling skills, because some of those inside tasks have been taken away from AI.

So I think AI is much.

It's not a threat, it's really a value add.

But also the multitude of career paths that you can explore.

You know, think about things like retail media, an advertising career path in a retailer.

Right.

Who would have thought that 10, 15 years ago?

Right?

Right.

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah.

It's a job.

It's a job where you're so close to the consumer, you get feedback all the time.

You can try things you want to try at any moment in time.

That's what I always loved about it.

But it is complicated.

And for some reason it does get kind of that rub or that stigma.

Why do you think that is?

I think it's because of the.

Of the significant.

You know, if you think about a branded business or a branded business that's in one vertical, you're super focused.

Right.

In one particular area, maybe the impulse space here we're covering so many different categories, so many different customers, and so many touch points, as you say.

Right.

That actually can have the tendency to make it quite complicated.

Yeah, yeah.

And you and I are kind of living proof to what you said too.

I mean, if you look back at our business school, which was like probably 900 people, there's like probably a handful of us that went into retail.

Right?

Exactly.

Exactly.

Here we are, together again.

All right, man.

Well, Andres, thank you so much.

Very welcome.

Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, it was great talking to you.

Hopefully we'll do this again sometime.

We'd love to.

The CEO of Naivas, the East African grocer who's doing very well, it sounds like.

So thanks to him, thanks to Vusion for sponsoring our coverage here at the World Retail Congress.

And to all of you out there, as always, be careful out there.