Winning Christmas 2025: Standing Out in a Season of Smart Spending
For many, Christmas remains the busiest time of the year. Whether you’re a shopper filling baskets or a retailer filling shelves, success during the holidays is all about anticipating needs, delighting customers, and delivering seamless experiences that make every interaction count. But this year, the holiday landscape looks a little different.
According to PwC’s Holiday Outlook 2025, consumers are entering the season with a more cautious mindset: overall holiday spending is expected to decline by about 5%, marking the first dip since 2020. Shoppers are becoming more selective, value-conscious, and deliberate — choosing retailers who can offer both value and meaning. Experiences, convenience, and authenticity are taking centre stage, while impulse purchases give way to smart, intentional shopping.
For grocery retailers, this shift represents both a challenge and a major opportunity.
Even as households tighten their budgets, spend on food, gatherings, and shared experiences remains resilient. People are still cooking, hosting, celebrating — and looking for ways to make those moments special. The question isn’t whether they’ll spend; it’s where they’ll choose to do so.
Retailers who deliver personalised, digital, engaging, and rewarding shopping journeys — grounded in loyalty and local relevance — are the ones most likely to win Christmas.
At Lobyco, our mission is to help retailers turn data into loyalty, engagement into action, and every customer moment into something meaningful. During the retail peak of the year, our partners use our technology to drive traffic, increase basket size, and build relationships that last long beyond December.
Welcome to our 2025 series: Winning Christmas — where we spotlight how our retail partners use digital loyalty, gamification, and personalised offers to make this season a success.
Foodstuffs: How one of New Zealand’s Largest Grocers Plans to Win Christmas
About Foodstuffs
Foodstuffs New Zealand is made up of two separate, regional co-operatives, Foodstuffs North Island and Foodstuffs South Island whose members own and operate the countries 500+ Four Square, New World, PAK’nSAVE, On the Spot, Gilmours and Trents stores. Collectively, Foodstuffs serves more than 4.5 million customers every week and employs nearly 40,000 team members nationwide.
A Season-Long Strategy for Engagement
Building on last year’s success, Foodstuffs and Lobyco are once again partnering to make the festive season more rewarding, engaging, and fun for New World shoppers. As Foodstuffs’ national full-service supermarket banner, known for its strong focus on quality, service and everyday value, New World is perfectly positioned to bring these festive experiences to life. This seamlessly aligns with New World’s brand promise to help customers to ‘Find your wonderful this Christmas’.
But this year, the strategy begins even earlier — as early as October — with the goal of actively shaping customer habits and building sustained engagement right through to Christmas.
At the heart of the 2025 approach is a strong focus on games and gamified experiences inside the New World App, enhanced by a full-scale marketing rollout including out-of-home, radio, digital, and social media. The aim is clear: encourage customers to grow their New World Dollars balance and return week after week throughout the season.
Christmas-Themed Challenges: Keeping the Festive Momentum High
From mid-November, the momentum shifts to Christmas-themed Challenges designed around classic Kiwi festive staples — think ham, lamb, desserts, and more.
These Challenges reward members as they stock up for the season, ensuring they continue earning New World Dollars at the exact moment holiday shopping peaks.
This approach directly aligns with PwC’s findings: while shoppers may be cutting back on gifts, spend on food, gatherings, and shared experiences remains strong. Foodstuffs’ strategy taps into this trend perfectly by rewarding purchases tied to what matters most to customers during the holidays.
And in a climate where personalisation is more important than ever, Foodstuffs’ use of targeted Category Offers ensures members receive relevant, meaningful discounts based on their own shopping habits. PwC highlights that retailers who tailor their promotions to different consumer segments will outperform those relying solely on blanket discounts — and Foodstuffs is doing exactly that.
By anchoring rewards to holiday favourites, Foodstuffs keeps its loyalty programme both timely and valuable, driving spend and satisfaction throughout December.
Festive Fun Returns: A Bigger, Better Christmas Game
From 1 December, Foodstuffs will once again delight shoppers with its Christmas-themed scratch-card game — but this year, it’s bigger, bolder, and more exciting than ever.
What’s New for 2025?
- Six scratch tiles instead of three — doubling the reveal moments and increasing the sense of excitement.
- The chance to win 2, 3, or 5 New World Dollars, instantly credited to a shopper’s loyalty balance.
- A total prize pool of up to $250,000 available across the campaign.
- A new game released every Monday at 12pm, keeping customers returning weekly to play.
- Running for four full weeks, ending 28 December — ensuring engagement remains strong throughout the entire Christmas period.
This fresh take on the scratch-card mechanic builds on the success of previous years while offering something noticeably new. More tiles mean more anticipation and more moments of delight — exactly the kind of emotional uplift shoppers appreciate during the holidays.
The game brings an element of festive fun to routine grocery shopping, enhancing the customer journey while strengthening the digital connection between shoppers and the brand.
Winning Christmas — The Foodstuffs Way
Despite a softer economic outlook, PwC pinpoints several resilient consumer behaviours — and Foodstuffs is strategically aligned with all of them.
- Consumers are still prioritising food and shared experiences:
Foodstuffs’ Challenges, built around Kiwi festive favourites, meet this demand with relevance and value.
- Shoppers want meaningful engagement, not just discounts: Personalised category Offers ensure every customer feels seen and rewarded.
- Digital experiences and gamification continue to grow in influence:
The expanded scratch-card game satisfies consumers’ desire for fun, interactive, rewarding moments.
By combining data-driven personalisation, full-funnel marketing, and engaging digital tools, Foodstuffs is not simply preparing for Christmas — they’re winning it.
