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When your brand promise is speed, downtime isn’t a glitch – it’s a business crisis.
In the quick-service restaurant (QSR) sector, where numerous transactions occur every second, network reliability is not just a matter of convenience but a critical factor that can determine whether a store meets or exceeds its target, or loses revenue. This is particularly true across Africa, where connectivity remains inconsistent, amplifying the stakes even higher.
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This is the reality Hungry Lion faced as it scaled from a regional player into a continental fast-food powerhouse. Founded in 1997 in Stellenbosch, the brand has grown to more than 500 outlets across seven countries, employs over 6,500 people, and plans to reach 1,000 stores by 2029. Expansion of that scale requires not just supply-chain precision, but also digital continuity – and that is becoming harder to guarantee.
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“Growth doesn’t just reveal technical gaps; it exposes operational ones.We could no longer rely on consumer-grade connectivity. We needed infrastructure that stayed up, everywhere, all the time,” says Hungry Lion’s CTO, Shalendra Singh.
The Pressure Cooker of African QSR
The QSR industry across South Africa and the continent is at a digital inflection point, facing unique challenges. These include the need for high-speed, reliable connectivity, the growing demand for contactless commerce, and the pressure to adopt energy-efficient systems. According to BMIT’s 2025 Retail Connectivity Report, local retailers lose an estimated R1.8 billion annually to network downtime. Industry research indicates that while cybersecurity remains a top-priority for African retailers, engineering extreme network resilience – including high-uptime connectivity, low-latency and operational continuity – is becoming equally critical, particularly given the interdependency of connectivity and security in modern retail operations.
Meanwhile, GSMA Intelligence projects that sub-Saharan mobile broadband subscriptions will exceed 600 million by 2026, highlighting the dependence on LTE as a retail backbone. Moreover, Gartner’s QSR Technology Outlook notes that customer experience metrics now rise or fall based on digital reliability: self-service kiosks, mobile payments, and delivery integration demand low-latency networks.
For South Africa’s fast-food operators, three structural pressures dominate
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Multi-site network complexity across urban, peri-urban, and rural regions.
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Regulatory differences across markets affect data and connectivity.
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Talent scarcity in network support, increasing dependence on automation and remote management.
Hungry Lion embodied these challenges as it expanded from South Africa into Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, Angola, Lesotho, and Eswatini – regions with contrasting infrastructure maturity and inconsistent last-mile delivery.
Designing for Imperfect Conditions
In 2024, Hungry Lion turned to leading ICT company Seacom, an OEM reseller and last-mile provider, and Metacom, one of the country’s premier ICT companies. The brief was blunt: create a single, accountable network architecture capable of delivering consistent uptime across multiple territories – and do it fast. Metacom, with its expertise and innovative communications solutions, was the perfect partner for this ambitious project.
Metacom’s answer was the MC7000 Enterprise Router, an all-in-one SD-WAN device integrating Wi-Fi, routing, and firewall capabilities, with dual primary last-mile connectivity across fibre, microwave, wireless, or fixed LTE, and failover onto dual internal GSM SIMs from different networks should primary last-mile options fail. The MC7000 Enterprise Router is also engineered with native multimedia capability – an optional module that offers organisations room for expanded video and audio functionality.
The configuration isolated four distinct Wi-Fi networks – Store, Staff, IoT, and Guest – through VLAN segmentation and dual VPN tunnels. This innovative solution provides Hungry Lion with a robust, reliable network architecture for its operations.
Each site is connected to Metacom Online, a management and analytics platform that provides the Hungry Lion ICT team with central visibility, compliance data, and live diagnostics.
“You can’t wait for perfect infrastructure,” says Réan van Niekerk, Metacom’s Chairman and CEO. “Africa rewards engineering pragmatism. We design systems that absorb failure instead of collapsing under it.”
Execution at Continental Scale
What followed was one of the most ambitious retail network rollouts in southern Africa – 10 to 12 stores a week, across seven countries, each pre-configured, tested, and activated remotely.
Metacom embedded support teams directly within Hungry Lion’s ICT operations to maintain accountability across partners. The model removed the traditional hand-off problem between OEMs, resellers, and end-clients – a pain point that has derailed countless multi-country technology projects.
Hungry Lion’s Singh credits the structure for transforming service delivery: “We stopped firefighting. For the first time, we had one line of command, one standard, one escalation path.”
That clarity proved crucial when a fire destroyed a branch in the Eastern Cape. The installed Metacom MC7000 Enterprise Router survived and continued operating through the blaze, in an almost literal demonstration of resilience engineered into the hardware.
Quantifiable Gains
Since the completion of the rollout, Hungry Lion’s network performance metrics have shifted sharply:
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Uptime exceeds 99.95%.
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Support resolution times have halved.
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Transaction interruptions were reduced to near zero.
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Consistent guest Wi-Fi availability across all stores, improving dwell time and repeat visits – a trend Gartner links to revenue growth of up to 19% in the QSR sector.
IDC’s African Retail Digital Index suggests such gains translate directly into operational ROI, with high-uptime retailers outperforming peers by 6 to 9% on average transaction volume. In an industry competing on margins of single-digit percentages, those points are material.
The Broader Context: QSR Trends to 2026
Beyond connectivity, several macro-trends are reshaping the African fast-food market:
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Omnichannel integration: digital ordering and delivery platforms are blurring lines between physical and online sales.
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Contactless commerce, accelerated by pandemic behaviour shifts, is now the default expectation.
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Energy and sustainability pressures: operators are adopting energy-efficient systems and intelligent power management to counter power outage volatility.
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Data-driven operations: predictive maintenance and real-time analytics are becoming standard even in mid-tier QSR chains.
All of these depend on one constant – reliable, secure, low-latency connectivity.
Metacom’s Edge
In this environment, Metacom’s role is striking. A privately owned South African company with more than 25 years of engineering lineage, Metacom has evolved from a niche industrial communications specialist into one of the most formidable competitors among global networking incumbents in the African mid-enterprise segment.
Its success lies in understanding local infrastructure instability and in designing devices and platforms that operate efficiently in bandwidth-constrained environments. This homegrown agility has allowed Metacom to capture sectors – retail, financial services, engineering, and logistics – where international vendors often struggle due to high costs, complex licensing, or slow regional response times.
Réan van Niekerk, Chairman/CEO, Metacom
“We don’t outspend the big global players. We out-engineer them for African conditions,” van Niekerk notes.
That engineering philosophy – systems built to tolerate imperfect networks, volatile power supply, and constrained budgets – has earned Metacom a footprint across tens of thousands of retail, financial, and engineering nodes throughout the continent.
Redefining Partnership
The Hungry Lion project forms part of Metacom’s ‘Beyond the Handshake’ initiative – a long-term strategy to showcase service culture as a competitive advantage. This initiative is not just about providing solutions but about building lasting relationships with clients, understanding their unique challenges, and delivering value beyond the initial agreement.
In a market saturated with generic technology providers, what differentiates Metacom isn’t marketing gloss but operational discipline: embedded support, transparent data, and measurable reliability.
Hungry Lion’s Singh reflects on the outcome: “Reliability is invisible when it works. That’s exactly how it should be. The best infrastructure is the kind you never have to think about.”
The Takeaway
Hungry Lion’s expansion and Metacom’s engineering partnership together capture a shift in African business thinking. Infrastructure is no longer the backstage cost of doing business; it is the architecture of competitiveness.
As African retail digitises and regional economies accelerate, companies that build resilience – not just capacity – will define the next decade of growth. Hungry Lion’s story, and Metacom’s role within it, make that lesson tangible: in a continent built on volatility, continuity is the ultimate differentiator.
COVER PHOTO: ITP.net
