IT Services25.05.2026

The man who is the CEO of a top South African fast-food chain and the founder of a well-known IT company

By Jan Vermeulen

Adrian Basson is the CEO of popular fast-food chain Hungry Lion and the founder and chairman of Digicloud Africa, a regional Google Cloud brokerage.

A self-described Afro-optimist who believes “Africa will be the place to be for the next generation or two,” Basson has three children and said he “creates jobs in Africa by selling chickens.”

Raised in the Western Cape, Basson attended D.F. Malan High School between 1990 and 1991 before transferring to Paul Roos Gymnasium in 1992, where he matriculated in 1994.

After school, he earned his B.Acc Accounting degree at Stellenbosch University, graduating in 2000.

In 2001, he joined the Shoprite Group as general manager of the Hungry Lion fast-food chain, a role he held until January 2015, when he became the group’s chief digital officer.

When Shoprite spun Hungry Lion out of the group in 2018, Basson became CEO of the newly independent company. That same year, Basson founded Digicloud Africa, where he is chairman.

Hungry Lion started in 1997 as a small eatery in Stellenbosch, when Shoprite explored the quick-service restaurant market.

The brand served fried chicken and chips at affordable prices, initially growing through available space linked to Shoprite supermarkets.

“In the beginning, we weren’t really building a brand — we purely sold chicken and chips at an affordable price on a somewhat ad-hoc basis,” Basson told Africa Outlook.

However, they soon found themselves with over 100 stores. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, Basson said they realised that stores without a brand, story, and experience would fail to deliver in the long term.

By the early 2010s, Shoprite had begun working to make the restaurant a separate entity. That included rebranding, refurbishing and rebuilding some of the restaurants.

Shoprite officially disposed of its interest in Hungry Lion Fast Foods on 1 July 2018. Since then, it grew into one of South Africa’s major fast-food chains, with a widening footprint across the continent.

Hungry Lion’s rapid growth

Data science and consumer analytics firm Eighty20 said in 2025 that Hungry Lion was South Africa’s fifth-most popular fast-food outlet. In 2024, it had an estimated two million monthly customers.

Hungry Lion opened 50 stores in 2023 and 100 stores in 2024, and celebrated its 500th store opening in October 2025.

By December 2025, Basson announced that Hungry Lion had opened in Mauritius, bringing its presence to 9 countries.

Their short-term target is to have 750 stores and 15,000 employees by December 2026. To achieve this, Hungry Lion aims to open 200 new stores in 2026.

“There’s no hiding from the fact that there are a lot of challenges in Africa, but retail is a promising sector,” Basson said.

“It facilitates opportunities, creates employment, and generally allows building a business that can have a widespread impact.”

Basson said they are proud to be a business that contributes to the success of underserved communities.

“When you reach a remote town with an empty plot, the local people don’t often have much,” he said.

“But as we’ve built new stores and helped to launch new shopping centres, we’ve been able to not only witness but also facilitate the construction of new, thriving ecosystems.”

Digicloud Africa

Digicloud Africa, which Basson founded months after Hungry Lion became independent, is Africa’s Google Cloud Brokerage.

It is a distributor for all Google Cloud products, including Google Cloud Platform, Google Workspace, and Professional Services Office, to the African Continent.

“It is our vision to digitise Africa through growing a strong partner ecosystem of specialist Google Cloud Partners,” the company stated.

“We empower our partners with training, technical assistance and administrative help so they can do what they do best, which is digitally transforming companies, schools and individuals through the Google Platform.”

On 30 September 2025, Digicloud Africa announced that it had been appointed as a distributor of Google Security Operations (SecOps) products in Africa.

Google SecOps is a cloud-native security operations platform that offers a unified experience across various systems.

Digicloud Africa said this empowered security teams to better detect, investigate, and respond to cybersecurity threats.