If you hate food waste and love a bargain, you’ll want to nip into your local Tesco after 9:30pm.
That’s because you might discover that the retailer is giving away free food with yellow stickers that they haven’t managed to sell.
A recent post on Reddit saw one baffled customer spot this in action, asking: ‘I might be completely out of the loop, is this common?’
Alongside this, they shared a snap of a sign on a shelf in the supermarket, which proclaimed: ‘From 9:30pm tonight until this Express store closes tonight, all yellow reduced-to-clear items marked ‘CS’ are yours for free.
‘Scan the item at the checkout, and the reduction will be automatically applied.’
Interestingly, the ‘CS’ actually stands for ‘colleague store’, and anything marked with these letters is available to staff members who have a Colleague Clubcard for free.
Staff still get first dibs on the reduced products, but any products that don’t get snapped up are then offered to customers for free. Charities are also offered the items as well.
This is something the retailer started trialing early in 2025, in a bid to reduce food waste and hit net zero goals, but some shoppers have only just discovered it.
Speaking at the time, a spokesman for the supermarket said: ‘We are constantly looking for innovative new ways to reduce food waste.
‘This trial, in a small number of our Express stores, will allow customers to take any remaining yellow stickered items for free at the end of the day, after they have first been offered to charities and colleagues.’
Potentially thousands of tonnes of food have been saved from the bin over the last few months because of this.
In the comments on Reddit, shoppers shared their own success at scoring freebies from Tesco.
‘I got three pizzas, two sandwiches, and blueberry muffins all for free and there was so much stuff left, wanted to leave some for other lucky ones,’ wrote u/CriticalThinker2805.
‘The worker there kindly told me that it was all free, without me asking for anything, and it was 9.55pm already. I was in a daze once I got out,’
Others claimed that their local Tesco Express store offers freebies a bit earlier in the evening, sometimes from 8:30pm or 9pm, so if you want to keep an eye out for bargains, you might need to head down a bit earlier.
However, there won’t always be products available for free, as it’s very much dependent on what stock is left over at the time, and sometimes there might not be any.
Have you managed to find some freebies in Tesco?
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Yes
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No
If you’re looking for other ways to save a little money this year, Martin Lewis has unveiled a 1p saving challenge.
The ‘relatively painless’ method will allow people to save as much as £667 over the next 12 months, and all you have to do is start by putting aside just 1p on January 1.
The 53-year-old explained how to do it in his newsletter, saying it’s a ‘fun’ way to start the new year.
You start off by saving 1p on January 1, and then you keep on adding to it each day. So you save what you saved the day before and add another penny to it each day.
So on January 2, you’d save your 1p and add 1p to save 2p, then for January 3, it would be 3p.
Continuing to do this each day throughout the year would mean that by December 31, 2026, you’d have added £3.65, giving you a total of £667.95.
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