Earlier in the year, Iceland launched a real-time yellow sticker tracker in partnership with Olio, the anti-food waste platform. Now, after a successful rollout in Manchester and London, Iceland is taking its £2 lucky dip bags nationwide. You can reserve your lucky dip bag from today, October 7th.
It’s a very similar concept to the Too Good To Go surprise bags: you reserve a bag, you go collect that bag, you take it home and find out what you’ve been given. The difference is, in the Iceland luck dip bag, you’re guaranteed eight items.
When you reserve a Too Good To Go surprise bag, you might get two, three, fifteen, or three bags full. It all depends on what the vendor has leftover on the day.
Where all other UK supermarkets list their leftovers in Too Good To Go, Iceland has decided to be different. Why? Who knows. When it comes to the customer, having one app for collecting leftovers is far easier. In a time where you need a new app to do anything, it would’ve been nice for Iceland to follow the crowd.
As it stands, you need to download Olio, create an account, and set your location.
The app will then show you what’s available to collect nearby. (A loaf of bread from Brenda, anyone?) You can change your location and the distance willy nilly – this means you can pick and choose which Iceland you want to collect from. We changed our location so it’s near the big Food Warehouse, rather than our small high street store, for example.
When it comes to the yellow sticker alerts, it’s a gamble: you see the discounted items, decide you want them, then head to the shop. By the time you’ve got there, someone else might’ve already bought the item. Reserving the lucky dip bags means you’ll definitely be taking your eight items home.
The collection process is similar to Too Good To Go. You show your confirmation in store and swipe it across, accept your bag with a “thank you”, then head home. Except, when you collect your bag, you need to pay at the till instead of paying on the app.
Easy peasy. There aren’t any bags available for us to reserve today, but we’ll come back and update this page when we’ve managed to give one a go.
