Food Lion launches MVP Shop & Earn rewards program

Food Lion has launched Shop & Earn, an enhancement of the chain’s MVP Customer Rewards frequent shopper program that significantly increases its shoppers’ savings through personalized offers on products and categories that they already buy.

The program rolled out chainwide today, following successful pilot tests in the chain’s Raleigh and Greensboro, N.C., markets last year.

“Shop & Earn is a unique loyalty program that puts our customers in charge of their savings,” said Deborah Sabo, senior vice president of marketing at Salisbury, N.C.-based Food Lion. “The more our customers shop, the more they will save. Offers are targeted to customers based on their specific purchases, fueling a program with nearly endless savings opportunities.”

Customers enroll in the program by visiting Food Lion’s website or mobile app where they activate their offers and see them load for the month in different categories. For example, shoppers can earn $4 when they spend $30 on meat and seafood over the course of the month, and $2 on the purchase of $15 of cleaning, laundry and paper goods. When they reach that purchase amount, the money is deposited in their MVP My Wallet, where they can be redeemed on the next shopping trip. The website and app keep track of how much money the shopper has already spent on the category during previous shopping trips. The rewards expire at the end of the month.

“Depending on how much a shopper typically spends, it is going to navigate that towards her spending habits,” Courtney James, media relations specialist at Food Lion, told Supermarket News. “The more you are using your MVP card, the better it is going to track and sort of mimic that. We want to reward our shoppers for how they are already spending.”

To kick off the program, new Shop & Earn users will automatically load an introductory “Earn $10.00 when you Spend $30.00” this month. After spending $30, the earned $10 is displayed in the shopper’s “My Wallet” in their MVP account to use on their next shopping trip.

“We had a lot of positive feedback from customers in our Raleigh and Greensboro test markets,” James said. “They were really happy to be rewarded for being loyal shoppers.”

James stressed that Food Lion’s popular MVP frequent shopper card is not going away. “These savings are going to be additional, personalized savings that are going to come through on a monthly basis on top of the normal coupons and savings that customers are already getting with the MVP card,” she said. “It is all linked through the MVP program, so there is nothing separate or cumbersome because we wanted to make it as easy as possible.”

To celebrate the program’s launch, Food Lion has partnered with Feeding America to donate one meal to local food banks for each Shop & Earn activation during February, up to one million meals.

The launch will be heavily marketed and advertised to shoppers. “You will see it all over,” James said.

A division of Ahold Delhaize USA, Food Lion operates more than 1,000 stores in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland.