A South African start-up is selling near-expiry groceries at up to 65% off through a web app built specifically around the realities of the local device market.
Still Good launched in May 2025 after co-founders Steffen Burrows, Lorenzo Parisi and Nabeel Gool saw the success of Danish start-up Too Good To Go and identified a gap in South Africa, where food-price inflation and high unemployment have left millions of households under pressure.
A store manager at a Pick n Pay, Spar or Food Lovers Market loads surplus stock onto Still Good’s admin portal at the end of the day. Registered shoppers receive an instant notification, pay online by card through Paystack and collect their bag from the store before closing. There is no delivery for the core product; Gool said the collect-only model keeps prices low. It collects a small commission on each sale.
Still Good says it operates in more than 174 Pick n Pay, Spar and Food Lovers outlets, plus several independent retailers, across every province except Limpopo, and that it saved shoppers nearly R4-million in its first six months. It reports 80 000 registered users and 104 000 active users over the past 30 days on Google Analytics.
Gool, who is the start-up’s technology chief, said the choice to build a progressive web app (PWA) rather than a native app came down to who Still Good is trying to reach. Between 60% and 70% of its users are on budget Android smartphones, mostly Samsung Galaxy A-series devices.
“App lifespans on those devices aren’t that long because users are afraid of apps eating data in the background, and storage is limited,” Gool said.
Reservation system
The PWA installs straight from a browser onto an Android home screen, without the Play Store or Huawei AppGallery. On iOS, it pins to the home screen as a bookmark.
When a store loads stock, Firebase Cloud Messaging pushes real-time notifications to subscribed users. A reservation system temporarily locks stock while a shopper checks out, preventing overselling, and Cloudflare edge caching sits in front of the API to reduce server load. Still Good also runs an AI language model across customer reviews to surface negative sentiment to retail partners, even when a shopper leaves a good rating.
Gool described Still Good as the only online-only platform of its kind in South Africa, though local rivals run similar models: Refreshi operates a comparable surplus “surprise bag” service, and JustNow flags near-expiry supermarket stock to shoppers. International peers include Too Good To Go and Canada’s Flashfood, which connect shoppers to surplus grocery stock through retailer partnerships.
Read: Supermarkets turn to AI to cut food waste
Still Good has since expanded into The Goods Marketplace, an online store selling non-perishable surplus goods such as batteries, cleaning products and electronics, delivered through the Pudo locker network. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
