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Taste Holdings is a South African food and beverage company that runs restaurant brands and, until recently, a coffee business, making money by selling food, drinks, and franchise rights to customers.
Taste Holdings is a South African company that owns and operates restaurant brands. For most of its life it was a collection of food businesses, and today its main surviving asset is the Domino's Pizza franchise in South Africa — it holds the master franchise rights to run and expand the Domino's brand across the country. People pay it for pizza, and franchisees pay it for the right to use the Domino's name and system.
The business works like many franchise operators. Taste Holdings runs some stores itself and sells franchise rights to independent operators who run the rest. It earns money from the food those stores sell and from the fees and supplies that flow through the franchise network. The appeal for customers is straightforward: Domino's is a global brand promising fast, cheap, delivered pizza, and Taste Holdings is the company that brought that promise to South African doorsteps. The story here is messy, and honesty matters. Taste Holdings once tried to be a big multi-brand food group, and it made a costly bet on coffee by acquiring the Starbucks franchise in South Africa. That coffee venture went badly, and the company struggled under debt and losses. It eventually sold or wound down much of its empire, leaving Domino's as the core. This is a company that shrank to survive rather than one that grew smoothly.
In 2000, Carlo Gonzaga started Scooters Pizza with a single outlet in Durban. Five years later it had doubled its slice of the pizza market to around 9%, making it the country's second biggest pizza delivery chain. The founder now had a brand that worked, and a bigger idea.
In 2005 Gonzaga bought the Maxi's franchise and formed Taste Holdings around it. His plan was simple: build a company that owns consumer brands, then use a stock market listing to buy up more franchises.
Soon after, Scooters Pizza was turned into a public holding company and renamed Taste Holdings Limited. The pizza chain was now a shell for something bigger.
In June 2006 Taste listed on the JSE's small-company board, the AltX, after selling shares privately to raise money. Now it had cash and a public currency to go shopping for franchises, just as the founder had planned.
By 2014 Taste signed a 30-year exclusive deal to bring Domino's Pizza to Southern Africa, and Scooters stores would be rebranded as Domino's. It was a bold bet: swap your own homegrown brand for a global one.
A year later, Taste signed an exclusive 25-year agreement to franchise Starbucks coffee shops across Sub-Saharan Africa. Investors loved it, and the share price jumped.
The share price peaked in mid-2015, then lost 97% of its value. The culprit was an overly ambitious expansion through Domino's and Starbucks, made worse by a weak economy. The two big bets were turning into two big costs.
In 2018, after 18 years leading the company, founder Carlo Gonzaga was replaced as CEO by Tyrone Moodley, an adviser to the new controlling shareholder, Riskowitz Value Fund, which had raised its stake to nearly two-thirds through a rights offer. The founder was out of the driver's seat.
The cost of launching Starbucks and Domino's had broken the company. In 2019 Taste decided to sell its food assets, including Starbucks, Maxi's and The Fish & Chip Co, and keep only its jewellery brands: Arthur Kaplan, NWJ and World's Finest Watches. The Starbucks licence and its outlets went for a tiny sum because funding for the food expansion could not be found. The pizza company had become a jewellery retailer.
Duncan Crosson, who ran the luxury goods division, was named group CEO as Taste focused on jewellery. He was the company's third CEO that year, after Dylan Pienaar stepped down and the shares fell 20%. The franchise dream was over; the jewellery counter was the business now.
That makes it a small, risky business rather than a steady giant. Its fortunes now hang on how well Domino's does in South Africa against rivals like Pizza Hut and local chains, and on whether it can keep the brand growing without the financial baggage of its past. Investors should treat it as a turnaround story, not a comfortable compounding machine.
Saved answer · last researched 4 Nov 2026