Chris (@blackorwa) has a blog on Kenya supermarket buyers, deciphering consumer patterns and habits of Nairobi shoppers by analyzing and decoding their discarded supermarket receipts.  This is an interesting experiment, in which they actually paid street kids to dig and dive for recipes in the garbage. They based their search for trends on a previous study at Walmart to draw out patterns of shoppers.

some interesting findings

• Supermarkets not within malls have 61%  of their customers buying less than 3 items and spending Kshs 200 (~$2) on average.
• M-PESA is yet to dominate retail – it was used for just 3.6% of supermarket transactions, with cards (credit/debit) used for 1.8% of transactions – as cash is still king at supermarkets. Safari com hopes to change that with 1tap which makes it faster to make purchases.
• On a typical weekday, a small well-positioned supermarket does 2,350 transactions with a value of about Kshs 360,000. This translates to about Kshs 10.8 million in revenue a month.
• Margins are thin, and supermarket profits are determined by controlling labour expenses.
• Cooked food, mineral water, and bakery drive a lot of sales – they have the highest sales volume and greatest profit margins.

Take a look at the study.