How to save money at Iceland and The Food Warehouse

Money saving tips to save on your weekly shop

The frozen food giant is making headlines with its cut price deals to stock your freezer, but are there ways to save even more money at Iceland. From loyalty schemes to meal deals, we’ll tell you all.

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Register for a Bonus Card

It’s worth picking up Iceland’s loyalty card. You won’t earn points on your spending, but you’ll get access to discounts and offers (details of these in this article).

You can join online or pick up a physical Bonus Card in-store and register it online.

Get 5% top ups with the Iceland Bonus Card

The loyalty scheme is called a Bonus Card for a reason – for every £20 you load onto the card, you get £1 cashback (so 5%). You can top up your balance in-store, online or on the app.

If you want to know how much money you have on the card, the balance can be viewed online, on the app or at the bottom of your receipt. You can spend as little or as much of your savings whenever you want, both in-store and online.

For every £20 you load on to your Bonus Card, you’ll get a £1 bonus. The money is protected and available whenever you need it. But you don’t want to be loading more than you spend on it, as you’re better off keeping your money in an account that pays you interest. 

So just load up how much you would roughly spend at Iceland (in increments of £20) to get the £1 bonuses when you’re ready to do your shopping. Do this each time, rather than leaving any large amounts of money on your Bonus Card. Just to note, it may take up to 48 hours for bonuses to appear on your Bonus Card.

Get a 20% Christmas bonus

Often in November, Iceland runs a Christmas savings promotion that boosts its Bonus Card cashback. Top up your card with £100 to get an extra £15 added on top of the standard bonus – so that’s a 20% boost to your savings. You can read more on our Christmas savings page which we update each year.

Get Bonus Card prices

Iceland’s Bonus Card members also get access to Bonus Card prices, which are similar to Clubcard and Nectar prices.

Get free delivery

There’s free next day home delivery for in-store & online shops for all Bonus Card holders, with a minimum spend of £40 online and £25 in-store. 

Most supermarkets charge a fee for home delivery, as much as £8.50, so it really is a big saver having it as a freebie. Iceland is, in fact, the only UK supermarket to currently offer this benefit.

Save 10% if you’re over 60 

Bonus Card holders over 60 get a 10% discount on their shopping every Tuesday in-store. You just need to show your card at the till alongside your bus pass, drivers licence or senior Railcard. It’s in-store only.

Save £6 with a Bluelight card

If you hold a Bluelight card, log into your account to generate a unique code to receive £6 off an online shop of £45 or more.

Save extra on your first online shop

There are often codes to save money off your first online order. At the time of writing it’s ICEFIVEOFF to get £5 off a £45 spend.

Refer your friends for money off

Refer a friend to Iceland.co.uk, and you’ll both get a £6 off voucher when they spend £45 or more online. 

Go via a cashback site

New customers can get 6% cashback via TopCashback and 3% cashback via Quidco, whilst existing customers get 1% cashback at both sites.

Load up your Bonus Card before you shop through a cashback site and use this to pay, effectively giving you a discount of up to 11%.

You can stack this cashback with codes found on the Iceland website, such as the ICEFIVEOFF one above, to give you an additional £5 off your shopping.

And don’t forget, new users to both Quidco and TopCashback can get up to £20 when they sign up through our link.

Top up your Bonus Card with a linked Debit or Credit Card

If you have your bank card linked to Airtime Rewards, you can earn up to an additional 4% cashback on spends at Iceland. If you use the card to top up your Bonus Card, you’re effectively getting two lots of cashback (or airtime credit in the case of Airtime Rewards). We’ve not tried this ‘double discount’ but let us know if you have and it works.

Go via Amazon for another welcome deal

You can also shop Iceland through Amazon and get a welcome deal of £10 off a £70 shop but you won’t be able to use your Bonus Card to pay, so will lose out on that 5% saving. 

Don’t buy gift cards

For most supermarkets, we’d recommend buying discounted gift cards from the likes of JamDoughnut, HyperJar and Cheddar but the cashback rates they give are not usually as high as the 5% bonus you get with the Iceland Bonus Card. 

At the time of writing, cashback levels were 3% at Cheddar, 3% at JamDoughnut and 3% at Hyperjar. 

You cannot use gift cards to top up the Iceland Bonus Card, and since that gives you a 5% bonus, you are better off in this instance, putting your money on that, rather than buying discounted gift cards.

Shop Iceland multibuy offers

Iceland’s multibuy deals can be worth a look. At the time of writing, their 8 for £10 mix and match . With the most expensive product in that deal costing between £2.50 and £3, you could save at least £10 if you bought 8 of these items. There’s even vegetables included in the deal and vegetarian options so it’s a great way to stock the freezer.

And don’t worry if you don’t have a freezer, there are plenty of multi-buy deals on fridge fillers as well as ambient products.

Shop the online budget aisle £1 or less

Iceland have a tab online that shows hundreds of products priced at £1 or less. If you’re shopping in-store, take a look at the online page before you go to see the broad selection of products available. They won’t be promoted together in-store, since the selection covers nearly every category of product, from cleaning to ready meals.

Head to Iceland early

Whilst most supermarkets reduce their food later in the day, Iceland actually puts its reduced products out in the morning. From what Iceland customers are saying, you could grab yourself a bargain, but don’t rely on it, since the size of their fresh section is very small in comparison to other supermarkets.

How do fresh food prices compare to other supermarkets?

So we know we can get good offers on frozen staples and cupboard essentials as well as fresh food. But are the prices comparable to the big supermarkets?

To find out I compared Iceland prices for meat and produce to Tesco prices. For example, large packs of chicken breasts at Iceland are £7.07 per kg but if you shop them as part of the two packs for £20 offer (which includes other products), they work out at £5.88 per kg. Tesco on the other hand is £5.99 per kg.

As part of the same offer, you can get a luxury Aberdeen Angus roasting joint for £12.50 kg which at Tesco, you’re looking at £13 per kg.

Neither has the best animal welfare standards (Iceland has the bare minimum Five Freedoms endorsement) but if the price matters, then Iceland wins with meat.

Unfortunately, fresh produce prices just can’t match Tesco’s prices, most probably due to the higher waste costs. Both shops sell cucumbers for 89p but that’s the best I could find. Tesco seemed to be cheaper on almost all other fruit and vegetable products. For example, strawberries were 61p cheaper in Tesco per punnet and iceberg lettuces were 40p cheaper in Tesco, so products weren’t differing by pennies.

Is Iceland the cheapest supermarket?

Iceland isn’t included in the comparison tables of supermarkets, most probably as they don’t sell everything that’s included in an average shop. For example, they do not sell fresh fish, only frozen.

But looking online at prices and comparing to other supermarkets, they are competitively priced on many things but not so much on fresh produce and branded household goods.  That said, they do offer some household products from cheaper brands, so you can find bargains.

You can’t compare it exactly to a big supermarket because it doesn’t have the variety of products, but it really can’t be beaten on price for its own label frozen products and for the branded frozen deals as well as many other multi-buy offers. And their loyalty scheme is great with its 5% cash bonus. So I’d say, it’s probably time to stock your freezer at Iceland.