The Grocer Gold Awards 2026: Technology initiative of the year

Winner: Lidl Plus - Lidl

Lidl’s loyalty app, Lidl Plus, was launched in 2020. But over the past year it’s evolved from a simple rewards app into an interactive, value-driven loyalty engine. And the discounter’s efforts through 2025 are paying dividends.

After all, more than half all shopping trips to Lidl now involve a customer claiming a loyalty coupon reward, up from a quarter last year – and the rate more than doubled from 26% in March 2025 to 57% in the four weeks ending 17 May 2026, according to Worldpanel data seen by The Grocer.

And when internal insights revealed that generic, one-size-fits-all discounts were losing their impact, with consumers increasingly fatigued by offers not relevant to them, Lidl set about significantly overhauling the data-driven engine that delivers personalised offers to customers. Every customer is now served a higher number of coupons that are a direct reflection of their basket, and it’s led to a measurable increase in both satisfaction and store visits.

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New gamification mechanics such as the Bakery Spin and an Advent Calendar leverage technology to drive greater store footfall and build long-term loyalty across core categories. “By embedding these surprising and delightful moments into the app, we turned a basic category into a talk-worthy event,” Lidl said. Click, Reserve & Collect – launched in April – was another first-of-its-kind feature that allows Lidl Plus users exclusive early access to Middle of Lidl products. The move transformed a potential pain point into an exclusive perk, while simultaneously providing Lidl’s logistics teams with better demand forecasting.

The app also introduced Lidl Pay, a frictionless mobile payment solution rolled out nationwide, which unified loyalty redemption and payment into a single scan, while Lidl & Go - the in-app, self-scanning technology - was built from the ground up to be “the best self-scanning solution in the market”.

Shortlisted:

• B2B.Store – ProConnect Platform
• Deliveroo – Bundles – Multi-partner ordering
• Iceland Foods & SAI Group – Real-time theft prevention with VLM
• Lidl GB – Lidl Plus
• Ocado Retail – Re-platforming to power the next wave of grocery disruption
• Point74 with The Compleat Food Group and Sustained – A New Recipe for Sustainability
• Vusion – Transforming the Shelf Edge