Read the Conversation
Conversation highlights:
- Empowering small businesses: SPAR Health supports independent community pharmacists with logistics, branding, marketing & promotional campaigns, and business data tools to help them stay competitive and deliver personalized care in their communities.
- Rapid growth: The company plans to double its pharmacy network to around 250–300 stores and expand its reach through new distribution centers in multiple provinces.
- Preventive approach: Alongside the key dispensing and clinic elements of pharmacy, SPAR Health is working to complement this with wellness, nutrition, and self-care, linking food retail with proactive healthcare.
- Training investment: Its academy trains pharmacy assistants and pharmacy support staff, expanding accredited training labs nationwide to build local healthcare skills.
- Loyalty through data: A new business intelligence unit provides unique business data to each pharmacy, boosting loyalty scores to over 60% and driving further growth.
- Patient-first mindset: Nicol urges the SPAR Health team to always put health and patient well-being first, and the retail metrics will follow.
EF: What do the past eight years in SPAR mean to you, and what are you most proud of on the journey so far?
JN: We connected to a strong brand in South Africa. I relate to the empowerment of independent owner-operators, which is where our business began. We were a small company that SPAR acquired in 2017, and we identify with independent retailers and operators working to get their businesses off the ground.
Our focus has been on SPAR pharmacies, but we also have other areas of the business. That's why we've transformed into SPAR Health, bringing together different elements to better support health in the communities we serve. It's been a great journey so far. Over the past eight years, we've consolidated our efforts around Pharmacy at SPAR. We know what we want to achieve for independent pharmacies connected to their communities, and those pharmacies are aligned with our vision. We've also been developing a broader framework for SPAR Health that extends beyond pharmacy alone.
EF: What priorities are you working on in South Africa, and what is the strategic importance of your operations in the group?
JN: Up until now, we've operated as a single distribution center encompassing three main businesses: a wholesaler, a specialized pharmacy, and a training academy. Right now, our focus is on expanding our footprint. We recently acquired a small wholesaler, the Aptekor Group, in the Western Cape. We're also putting up a new one from scratch in KwaZulu-Natal. We're exploring other areas as well to ensure we can service all our customers, including SPAR and non-SPAR pharmacies.
Another major initiative is expanding the SPAR pharmacy network. We currently have 125 and plan to double that to 250 within three years. That would give us roughly one pharmacy for every four or five SPAR supermarkets. This supports our broader strategic goal of supporting consumer health. Pharmacies are typically reactive, focused on treating illness. Still, we want to play a more proactive role in preventing disease through primary healthcare, self-care, and community health initiatives, involving SPAR pharmacies and the core SPAR business of supermarkets.
The training academy is another priority. We started with one training lab at our distribution center in Gauteng, but now have three new training labs in Pretoria, Cape Town, and Durban. We'll continue to expand these, offering the pharmacist assistant program and other training for front shop and clinic personnel.
We plan to expand geographically to be closer to our pharmacies, to patients and consumers, improving access and service. At its core, SPAR is a logistics, supply chain, and warehousing company, aligning with what we do. Our focus on retail proficiency allows independent retailers and pharmacies to thrive. We invest heavily in helping them run their businesses effectively, including retail systems and practices, as well as stock levels.
Pharmacy is highly regulated, and we can't sell scheduled medicines across borders. So even though SPAR is strong in SADC countries like Namibia, Botswana, and Mozambique, we're restricted from selling there.
Angelo and the senior team share my focus on finding the right balance between retail and the health sides of the business. I often emphasize this across SPAR: while we support independents with branding, marketing, promotions, and advertising, what also matters is retail proficiency, operational efficiencies, customer service, and patient care, allowing independent pharmacies to compete more effectively in the market.
Another challenge for us in the healthcare sector is to remember that the keyword is health. It's not just about retail excellence or how many people walk through the door; we must also continue to focus on each consumer and each patient's health. We must keep this at the center of everything we do. The SPAR core business drives retail; we drive healthcare; and together, we drive wellbeing in the communities we serve.
EF: How do you see the market adoption evolving in South Africa, and, beyond that, how do you see SPAR in different countries as an extension?
JN: One of our biggest opportunities is to stay grounded and make this business a success in South Africa first. When you think about health, prevention, and self-care, food and nutrition play a major role. The question is how to connect those worlds.
In pharmacy, we stay true to who we are. A pharmacy is a pharmacy because it has a dispensary, and the lifeblood of the dispensary is prescriptions. Each pharmacy has three parts: the dispensary, the clinic, and the front shop. One of our challenges is keeping the front shop pharmacy- and health-focused. Across the industry, not just at SPAR, we're seeing medical schemes play a role in transforming pharmacies into primary healthcare destinations. That's important. In primary care, people come in for vaccinations, family planning, or dressings for minor injuries. Wellness and health checks are also key; they help people better understand their health and make more informed self-care decisions.
The front shop complements self-care by offering over-the-counter products, consumer health products, vitamins, and supplements that support prevention and self-care – often before scheduled medicines are necessary. I frequently remind our SPAR Health team that while we operate in a very competitive environment, those competitors, big and small, are our peers working toward the same goal: improving the health of all South Africans.
EF: Which initiatives have been most effective in improving your connection with customers, and how do you assess these initiatives as your customer loyalty has grown over the past year?
JN: What we've always taken pride in, even before SPAR came on board, is good service. Healthcare is personal, and we've been lucky to work with independent pharmacists who know their communities well and have often been serving them for years. Our focus has always been on three areas: the dispensary, the clinic, and the front shop. We make sure stock is always available and correctly priced.
The biggest change we've made is creating a dedicated business intelligence unit within SPAR Health. We needed to understand what each pharmacy is doing, their challenges, wins, and losses, and recognize that each one requires a different conversation. The team built a dashboard for every pharmacy, and our account managers across the country visit each one at least once a month to address their needs. This data-driven account management has changed how we support pharmacies. When we took on the pharmacy business full-time three years ago, loyalty sat at 27%. It's now 60%. SPAR's overall loyalty is around 80%, which is our benchmark.
We also recognize that independent pharmacy retailers need that 20% flexibility to preserve their independence and individuality in their communities. I'm comfortable aiming for 80%. We're at 60% now, and as we expand geographically, our service model will evolve, and loyalty will keep rising. 80% is the goal, allowing our independent retailers to remain unique while thriving under the SPAR Health model.
EF: How do you provide personalized attention to the community whilst growing the pipeline of pharmacies to 250 in the next three years?
JN: We look after each one of the 125 pharmacies in our network, whether small, large, new, or well-established. Because they're independent, they naturally connect with their communities. We've worked hard to help strengthen that connection. We support pharmacies directly and have launched a program to connect them with local doctors. We've recently introduced a program that connects pharmacies to their communities through school sports. Some work with nursing homes, others with local animal shelters. That's what makes independence special: each pharmacy gives back in its own way. They support schools, churches, and community causes, and the community supports them in return.
EF: In the academy, how are you using training and patient education to strengthen primary healthcare, prevention, and wellness?
JN: Most of our training focuses on pharmacist assistant training. Pharmacists are employed across both private and public healthcare, as well as in the manufacturing and distribution sectors. Every licensed business needs a responsible pharmacist, and pharmacist assistants play a key role in supporting them. There are two levels of qualification, basic and post-basic. Today, this is a qualification accredited by the South African Pharmacy Council that takes 18 to 24 months to complete. Recently, this course has undergone some changes, with greater emphasis on occupational training. There now needs to be face-to-face training in a training laboratory, complemented with workplace experience.
From our side, through the training academy, we're planning to introduce more courses aligned with supporting pharmacy support personnel - front shop operations, clinics, and the transport of medicine. People often ask if we can train nurses in clinics, but we don't. Just as there are pharmacy schools, there are nursing schools. Our focus is to train pharmacy support personnel and to support clinic services. You mentioned consumer education; we still have work to do. SPAR is doing great work around digital customer engagement, and our goal is to leverage these developments. We're not looking to build a separate system but rather align with what's already in progress. There's still a way to go, but that's the direction we're moving in.
EF: What else do we need to create more resilience and a sustainable healthcare model in South Africa?
JN: We need a stronger focus on prevention across the healthcare system. People often talk about wellness, but what they usually mean is checking sugar and cholesterol levels or getting a vaccine. Wellness is about prevention, which means proactively managing your lifestyle to pursue good health. When you do that well, you might also reduce medical costs, in addition to an elevated sense of well-being. Globally, people are living longer but aren't getting healthier. Obesity, weight gain, and diabetes are all on the rise. That tells us there's still a lot of prevention required in healthcare. Once we find the right balance, we'll start seeing real change. We don't have all the answers yet, but SPAR's platform gives us room to keep learning. Food and nutrition are a key starting point. The question is how we connect that to what we're already doing in healthcare and link it to SPAR supermarkets to help people make better, healthier choices.
EF: What excites you the most about entering 2026 for SPAR Health?
JN: What I'm most excited about is that we're going to transition from a single-location business to a multi-location business, which means we can really deliver the service we promise at a much more effective level. It's a combination of our geographical expansion and the customer base that we are growing. We're moving from operating only in Gauteng to expanding into multiple regions, starting with the Western Cape and KZN.
It's exciting because, if we truly believe we're helping our customers and retailers do better in their communities, we can do so even more effectively. In the end, it's about the people we serve. It could be a patient, someone focused on their health, a student wanting to study, or a medical specialist trying to get the right medicine for their patient on time. We go one patient, one script at a time, and that keeps us grounded. If we can see the trees in the forest, then we know we're doing it right by doing right by the communities we serve. It's a rewarding space to be in, and the personal satisfaction it offers each of us in SPAR Health makes the work even more meaningful.
