Rapid urbanization in Africa has been accompanied by a major transformation in national and local food systems. Thomas Reardon and colleagues were the first to argue that this transformation was being driven by a “supermarket revolution” that involved increasingly greater control over food supply and marketing by international and local supermarket chains (Reardon et al 2003, Weatherspoon and Reardon 2003). The current situation in Africa has been called the “fourth wave” of supermarketization in the Global South (with the others being in Latin America, Asia, and some African countries such as South Africa) (Dakora 2012). The transformation is driven by the development of new urban mass markets and the profit potential offered to large multinational and local supermarket chains (Reardon 2011). The restructuring of urban food systems by supermarkets involves “extensive consolidation, very rapid institutional and organizational change, and progressive modernization of the procurement system” (Reardon and Timmer 2012). Integral to the process of food system restructuring is a simultaneous “quiet” or “grass-roots” revolution in urban food supply chains with tens of thousands of small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) involved in trucking, wholesale, warehousing, cold storage, first and second stage processing, local fast food, and retail (Reardon 2015). These two views of food system revolution – one emphasizing the domination of supermarkets over supply chains from farm to fork and the other emphasizing the plethora of opportunities for small businesses in agri-food chains – are likely to vary in relative importance from place to place depending on local context.