What started with a fresh pizza range and a single SPAR Sea Point listing during COVID has grown into an established retail arm for the 34-year-old restaurant brand.
For more than three decades, Col’Cacchio has been part of South Africa’s restaurant landscape. But when COVID disrupted the industry and changed the way people were eating, the family-owned business began looking beyond the restaurant for ways to stay connected to its customers.
One of those ideas was retail.
Col’Cacchio launched a fresh pizza range through SPAR Sea Point, its first retail customer. What began with that single listing steadily developed into a new part of the business, later expanding into frozen pizzas with Checkers and a broader retail presence across selected SPAR and Checkers stores, as well as Nibbly Bits stores around the country.
That move is now earning recognition of its own. Col’Cacchio’s retail pizza range recently received Gold and Silver at the Food & Home Awards in the Frozen and Ready-Made Meals category. The Butternut, Feta and Pumpkin Seed Praline pizza received Gold and was named Best Pizza in the category, while the Frozen Pepperoni and Portuguese Sausage Pizza received Silver.
For Col’Cacchio, the awards also mark how far a part of the business that did not exist before COVID has come.
“COVID forced us to look at our business differently,” says Etienne Pieterse, Group CEO of Col’Cacchio. “For years, people had known Col’Cacchio as somewhere they went for a meal. Retail gave us an opportunity to reach people in a completely different way. Someone could pick up a Col’Cacchio pizza while doing their grocery shopping and enjoy it at home.”
Getting a restaurant pizza into the supermarket freezer
Moving into retail was not simply a matter of putting the Col’Cacchio name on a box. The challenge was translating a product associated with the restaurant experience into something customers could take from a supermarket freezer, cook in their own kitchen and still recognise as Col’Cacchio.
That connection can be seen in the Gold-winning Butternut, Feta and Pumpkin Seed Praline pizza. The flavour combination is already familiar to restaurant customers through Col’Cacchio’s Norm’s Pralina pizza, taking an established part of the restaurant menu into the retail range.
“For us, the important part was that retail couldn’t feel like a watered-down version of the restaurant brand,” says Pieterse. “The occasion is different, but the expectation from the customer isn’t. If it carries the Col’Cacchio name, it still has to be something we’re proud to put in front of people.”
A different place at the dinner table
The retail range now sits alongside a restaurant business operating across South Africa, Namibia and Mauritius, as well as Col’Cacchio GO and the group’s delivery offering.
Rather than replacing one experience with another, the different channels allow Col’Cacchio to be part of different occasions. A customer might eat at a restaurant one week, order delivery the next and pick up a frozen pizza with their groceries another.
“We don’t see restaurant and retail as competing occasions,” says Pieterse. “It’s about giving consumers more ways to have Col’Cacchio. Sometimes that’s dinner inside one of our restaurants and sometimes it’s opening the freezer at home on a Wednesday night. We want to be able to be part of both.”
The retail awards also come during a period of wider recognition for the business. Col’Cacchio was named Best Restaurant Chain in South Africa at the 2026 South African Restaurant Awards, retaining the title it won in 2025, and recently received a SuperSAKE Award at the 2026 ontbytSAKE Toekennings.
For Pieterse, however, the significance of the retail story is still best measured against where it began.
“Winning Gold and Silver is a great acknowledgement for the team, but I think what we’re most proud of is what sits behind it,” he says. “This started at a time when we were trying to find new ways to reach our customers. To see it grow from one retail listing into something people are now actively choosing for their homes is incredibly rewarding.”
What began as a response to one of the most difficult periods South Africa’s restaurant industry has faced has become something more permanent: a new part of how Col’Cacchio does business.