South African tycoon Brian Joffe, who built Bidvest, wins lifetime achievement award

South African tycoon Brian Joffe, who founded the Bidvest Group Ltd. and turned it into one of the country's biggest employers, has received a lifetime achievement award and used his acceptance speech to tell business owners that wealth brings a duty to give.

Joffe, 79, was presented with the Kirsh Family Lifetime Achievement Award, given in honour of the anti-apartheid lawmaker Helen Suzman, at the Investec Jewish Achiever Awards on Sunday, Nov. 1. The award is presented in association with the family of billionaire Natie Kirsh, whose Kirsh Group grew from a wholesale business in Eswatini into an international investment group. The awards recognize members of South Africa's Jewish community for work in business, the professions, the arts and public service.

"One of the responsibilities of entrepreneurship isn't only making, it's also giving," Joffe told the audience. He urged Jews, and South African Jews in particular, to "stick together, work together, live together, and help each other out."

Asked about his greatest achievement, Joffe said: "I left a lot of people much better off than they were before I met them."

From pet food to Bidvest

Joffe was born in Johannesburg and qualified as a chartered accountant after graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1971. His mother wanted him to become a doctor, but he dropped medicine and moved to accounting, which he described as a "very good grounding" for business.

In 1978 he borrowed R49,000 to buy an interest in a pet-food maker. A decade later he set up Bid Corporation by acquiring Chipkins and Sea World, a food-service business that became Bidvest. Over the next three decades he built the group through hundreds of acquisitions, including the logistics companies Safcor and Rennies, the office-products business Waltons, the hygiene group Steiner and the car dealer McCarthy.

He told the audience that he and Stephen Koseff, the co-founder and former chief executive of Investec Group, "agreed everything on a napkin" on their large deals and never wrote down a single agreement.

Two listed companies

In 2016, Bidvest split off its international food-service operations into a separately listed company, Bid Corporation Ltd., known as Bidcorp. Joffe stepped back from running Bidvest around the time of the unbundling. He said the group had about 140,000 employees when he left.

Together, Bidvest and Bidcorp now run more than 250 businesses. In the financial year to June 2026, Bidcorp reported revenue of R242.2 billion ($14.6 billion) and Bidvest R130.3 billion ($7.85 billion). Koseff estimates that the two companies have a combined market value of close to R250 billion ($15.1 billion). Mpumi Madisa is now Bidvest's chief executive.

After leaving Bidvest, Joffe returned to the stock market in 2017 with Long4Life Ltd., an investment company focused on lifestyle and leisure businesses that he listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

Joffe is now retired and lives in Israel, though he keeps close ties with South Africa. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of South Africa and the University of the Witwatersrand. He has said his approach to philanthropy came from his uncle, Benny Weinstein, who taught him to give at least 10% of what he earns to tzedakah, the Jewish practice of charitable giving.

Other winners at this year's awards included Sorbet beauty-salon founder Ian Fuhr, who received the Eric Ellerine Entrepreneur Award, and the surgeon Laurence Chait, who won the Investec Professional Excellence Award.

Figures were converted at R16.6 to the dollar.