Healthier Choices

Everyone needs a helping hand in making those healthier choices both more accessible and affordable. We know that always ensuring we have a nutritious and balanced diet isn’t easy, so as part of our wider healthy eating strategy, we’ve employed a number of mechanisms across promotion and placement, incentives, information and signposting. These interventions help our customers by making healthier choices that little bit easier.

• Consistently low prices: As a discounter we pride ourselves in offering the highest quality food at the lowest price.  We work hard to keep prices low throughout our entire product range, this is the foundation of making good food accessible to everyone. See 'Peas Please' for further commitments.

• Strong promotions: For many years we’ve offered strong promotions on our healthiest categories. We are committed using price driven promotions such as Pick of the Week to drive sales of healthier products, such as fruit and veg, and to utilise our reward app 'Lidl Plus' to incentivise the sale of healthier products. Through our Pick of The Week promotions we significantly discount 6 different fruit and vegetable lines every week making it easier for heathy staple foods to always be part of our customers' baskets, as well as encouraging new products to be tried. See 'Peas Please' for further commitments.

• Front of store: As part of our store re-design we brought our fruit and vegetable section to the front of our stores, making healthy fresh products even more accessible and promoting them as the first choice for our customers.

• Healthier checkouts – Since 2014, we’ve stopped selling sweets and sugary treats at our checkouts. 

• Removing cartoons from cereals: Since Spring 2020 we have stopped displaying cartoon characters on our own-brand cereal ranges, helping parents tackle pester power in the supermarket aisles. The move is in response to nearly three-quarters of parents saying they experience pester power from their children in the supermarket, with over half believing cartoon characters on cereal packaging encourages this.

• Traffic light labelling: As part of our ongoing commitment to providing clear nutritional labelling for our customers we have applied Front of Pack traffic light labelling across our own brand food range. We aim to provide energy, fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt contents alongside reference intakes (RI) where possible, helping customers to make food choices based on easily accessible, understandable and comparable nutritional information.

• Healthy Start: We recognise the challenges of eating healthily for financially struggling families.  That’s why from the start of 2021 we invested in increasing the value of Healthy Start vouchers from £3.10 to £4.25 in England and Wales ahead of the government's planned increased from April 2021.  This has supported over 200,000 customers to provide healthier food for their families.

• Healthier swaps: In early 2021 we trialled a new ‘Healthier Swaps’ initiative for 3 weeks in store where we signposted a range of healthier alternative products that are easy to make and at the same price or less.  These flags were importantly brought to the shelf edge where we know our customers make key food buying decisions. The flags were offering simple to make swaps, often not requiring customer to alter meal plans. We’re committed to continue to roll out regular customer campaigns, like Healthier Swaps, to drive the sale of healthier products.

In 2017, we were one of the founder signatories to the Food Foundation’s 'Peas Please' pledge. As part of the initiative we are committing to run more discounts on vegetables, in a bid to making greens more affordable for more families.