In Diepsloot, Johannesburg, a store has opened where there are no shelves of branded packets — just rows of automated dispensing machines. You bring your own container, tap a prepaid card, and pour out exactly as much maize meal, rice, sugar, cooking oil or detergent as you can afford today. It's called SKUBU, built by South African tech startup Sonke, and it claims prices up to 60% lower than traditional retail — simply by cutting out the packaging.

How it works

Customers buy a once-off SKUBU card for R10 and load money onto it at the store. The dispensing stations are IoT-enabled: they weigh or measure what you pour, price it in real time, and track stock levels live so the store knows exactly when to restock. Staff are on hand to help first-time shoppers, but the buying itself is fully automated.

  • No packaging cost — you refill your own bottle or bucket, so you only pay for the product.
  • Buy in rands, not package sizes — if you have R15 for maize meal, you buy R15 of maize meal. No more choosing between a too-small sachet and a too-big bag.
  • Less plastic waste — as of March 2026, the two Diepsloot stores had diverted about 1.5 million bottles, bags and packets from landfill and saved shoppers roughly R1.3 million.
www.itweb.co.za Sonke debuts its first automated refill store in Diepsloot South African tech start-up Sonke has launched SKUBU, an IoT-enabled automated refill store in Diepsloot that lets customers refill containers with household essentials at bulk prices while cutting plastic waste.

Why this matters for the township economy

The genius of SKUBU isn't really the machines — it's the pricing model. Most low-income households don't budget in package sizes; they budget in rands, day by day. Traditional retail punishes that reality: the smaller the pack, the more you pay per kilogram. Refill retail flips it — everyone pays the same bulk rate whether they're buying R10 or R100 worth.

The project launched with serious backing — the TRANSFORM impact accelerator supported by Unilever, the UK government and EY — precisely to test whether this model can scale. Early signs say yes: after the first store at Chuma Mall came a second at Bambanani Mall, and Sonke has been exploring a compact, container-based version called SKUBU Nyana designed to reach deeper into underserved areas.

www.capetownetc.com Watch: What can R100 get you? Inside Skubu's refill store model A content creator tested how much he could buy at South Africa's first automated refill store with just R100 — sparking online discussion about grocery affordability and plastic waste.

What spaza shops can learn from SKUBU — without the machines

Here's the part we find most exciting at SparzaFi: you don't need IoT dispensers to use the refill model. The core ideas transfer to any spaza shop with a scale and a bulk supplier:

  • Sell loose, by weight. Buy a 25kg bag of maize meal or a 20L drum of oil, and sell it out by the gram or millilitre with a simple kitchen scale. The margin that used to go to packaging stays in the till — and you can still undercut the small-pack shelf price.
  • Let customers buy rand amounts. "R15 of sugar" is how your customers already think. Meeting them there builds loyalty that a sealed packet never will.
  • Track stock by weight, not units. If you know you started with 25kg and every sale is logged, you know exactly when to reorder — that's the real benefit SKUBU gets from its sensors, and a notebook or a simple system can do the same job.
  • Prepaid customer accounts. SKUBU's R10 card is just a wallet. Township shops have run accounts and stokvel-style savings for generations — digital tools now make it easy to do the same without paper books.

The SparzaFi angle

SparzaFi exists to give township and rural shops the same tools the big players have — customer accounts, stock tracking, credit records and an online storefront. The refill model fits that mission perfectly, and it's a space we're watching closely as we build out weight-based selling for the shops on our platform.

If you run a spaza shop and you've been thinking about selling staples loose, SKUBU is proof the demand is real. The machines made headlines — but the model is the treasure, and the model is free.