Supermarket loyalty cards: what the till knows that your brand doesn’t

Naivas — earn

1 point per KES 100 spent

Naivas — value

1 point = KES 1, spent at the till. About 1% back

Naivas — expiry

Points expire after 5 years

Carrefour MyCLUB — earn

2.5 points per KES 100 spent

Carrefour MyCLUB — redeeming

From 10,000 points. The KES value per point is not published

Who holds the data

The retailer

Kenya’s two big grocery loyalty programmes are well run and genuinely useful to shoppers. They are also the clearest illustration of a problem an FMCG brand cannot solve by joining in: the supermarket learns who bought your product, and you do not.

Two programmes, two shapes

Naivas runs a physical Reward Card. You earn one point for every KES 100 spent, in any store, and a point is worth one shilling at the till — about 1% back, which is unusually easy to understand. Points expire after five years, cannot be transferred and cannot be taken as cash. You register in store with a national ID or passport and a phone number, and if you pay by M-Pesa the points attach automatically.

Carrefour’s MyCLUB, launched in Kenya in November 2019, has no plastic at all: a barcode in the app is scanned at checkout. You earn 2.5 points for every KES 100, with bonus points on selected lines, and you can redeem from 10,000 points against your bill.

One difference matters more than it looks. Naivas publishes what a point is worth. For MyCLUB, the earn rate is published and the conversion is not, at least not anywhere we could reach — so a shopper can tell how fast points arrive but not what they will be worth when they get there.

The scale of the database

Naivas has reported growing card numbers for years: around 1.2 million cardholders in 2019, 2 million by late 2023, and 3.6 million as quoted by its chief of strategy in May 2024. The company said in 2019 that it would put KES 170 million into the programme over three years. Carrefour has never published a Kenyan membership figure.

Naivas describes the programme in its own words as “a customer insights-driven tool that helps us personalize offers, localize experiences, and deliver maximum value to our shoppers”. That is a fair description of what a loyalty card is for: it turns anonymous tills into a named purchase history.

Does any of it reach the brand?

This is the question a brand manager should ask, and it deserves a careful answer rather than a convenient one.

Neither retailer publishes any commitment to share shopper-level purchase data with the brands whose products they sell, and we found no public source showing an FMCG supplier able to identify who bought its product through either programme. It would be equally unsupported to claim they share only aggregates — nobody publishes the arrangement either way.

What is documented sits at group level. Carrefour’s owner, Majid Al Futtaim, runs a retail media business, Precision Media, across 450 stores in 13 countries, offering brands targeting and insights built on first-party loyalty data covering 20.5 million members. Its public material does not name Kenya, and it describes targeting and insight rather than handing over identified shopper records. Naivas publishes nothing at all about supplier access to shopper data.

The card is the supermarket’s asset. You are a line on somebody else’s receipt.

And there is a structural limit that no data deal fixes. A supermarket card can only see what happens in that chain. A brand sold through dukas, kiosks and distributors — which in Kenya is most of the volume — is invisible to it entirely.

The liability nobody budgets for

A loyalty database is also a risk, and Kenya has a documented example. In April 2023 Naivas was hit by ransomware; reporting at the time put the exfiltration at 611GB sourced from the loyalty programme, including names, phone numbers, emails and points balances. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner found the company had failed to report the breach within the 72 hours the law requires, exposing it to a fine of up to KES 5 million.

That is not an argument against loyalty programmes. It is an argument for holding as little as the job requires — a principle worth applying to any promotion you run yourself.

What an on-pack reward does instead

The comparison is not really like for like, and it is worth saying so: a supermarket card rewards a basket across a whole shop, while an on-pack code rewards one product. But for a brand, that is exactly the point.

• The purchase is tied to your product, not to a basket, and it works in a duka as well as in a supermarket aisle.
• The relationship is with you. The reward comes from your brand, in your name, to the person who chose your pack.
• You can ask them a question — and pay them for the answer — which no retailer card gives a supplier.
• You never hold their phone number, which means you are not carrying the database that came out of Naivas in 2023.

Researched 20 September 2026 from the sources below. Earn rates, point values and terms change — check the current position with each retailer before relying on any figure here.