The 504-day On Shelf Availability reset

On 6 October 2026, South Africa passed 504 consecutive days without Eskom load shedding, and Eskom's diesel spend between 1 April and 1 October 2026 fell by R4.79 billion - down 80.49% on the comparable half (Source: Further Africa / Eskom). For FMCG suppliers and their retail partners, the grid itself has effectively fallen out of the on-shelf availability conversation. The question is whether the root-cause coding has caught up with the operating environment.

The grid is no longer a credible OOS cause at scale

At 504 days without load shedding, an out-of-stock logged on a Monday morning in Sandton or Umhlanga is overwhelmingly a supply or planning failure, not a power event. Localised Eskom "load reduction" still touches about 202,590 customers — 2.8% of the base — mostly in parts of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, with full elimination targeted for March 2027 (Source: Further Africa / Eskom). Suppliers whose OSA dashboards still carry "load shedding" or "power" as a material cause code are now hiding genuine supply issues inside a category that no longer applies at scale. Any OSA review that treats the environment as still power-constrained will quietly understate the real gap.

Retailer buyers will press harder on fill rate and OTIF

Strip the power layer out and what remains lines up almost entirely with supplier fill rate, OTIF, DC replenishment and in-store execution. Range review conversations in the next cycle will lean into asking the same question, “last year you had load shedding; this year?" and the supplier who comes to the meeting without a sharper fill rate number than last year will have a harder negotiation. The flip side is also useful. Suppliers whose fill rate performance has genuinely improved now have a cleaner story to tell, with the environmental noise removed; the improvement reads as execution rather than luck. The 2027 joint business plan is also the natural moment to retire fill-rate waivers and OTIF indulgences that were extended based on a disrupted environment that no longer exists.

A time-bound window to re-benchmark

Retailers and suppliers both have roughly 12 months of load-shedding-free data to rebuild their OSA root-cause taxonomy and reset targets off a clean baseline. OSA targets set during 2022-2024 were implicitly scored against a power-constrained environment; those targets are now too easy to beat for the wrong reason. Promotional lift analysis cleans up on the same curve — a promo that under-delivered in 2023 may genuinely have been power-constrained, but a promo that under-delivers in 2026 is not. For the next supplier-retailer joint business plan, the operating assumption that both sides share — and whether the OSA targets inside it are honest — is where the easy wins are.

BD-Nav's Stock Management KPA was built to produce that cleaner read: root-causing OOS against the current operating environment rather than the one from three years ago, and setting OSA targets off a clean baseline. The suppliers who refresh their root-cause assumptions and their 2027 OSA targets for a load-shedding-free environment will defend their listings more sharply when the trading-terms conversation starts.