IGA goes all out with food giveaway

An IGA shopper will win 25 years of free groceries thanks to a promotion now being run by Sobeys Quebec.

The IGA Great Food Giveaway (IGA paye la bouffe) will award the grand prize winner $130,000 in gift cards. It’s also handing out 50 prizes of free groceries for a year, worth $5,200 each in gift cards.

Guy Terroux, vice-president of marketing at Sobeys Quebec says that, to his knowledge, it’s the first time Sobeys has conducted a drawing of this size. “It’s a way to thank customers who shop regularly in our stores,” he says.

To participate in the contest, customers who present their Air Miles card to an IGA cashier get one automatic entry for every $10 of admissible purchases before taxes. The contest runs from Feb. 11 to April 6 in all IGAs in Quebec and in New Brunswick IGAs that are part of the Sobeys Quebec network.





IGA - concours - Paye la bouffe from ROMEO & FILS on Vimeo.

The contest is being promoted on TV and radio until March 23, as well as in flyers and on in-store signage, social media and the IGA website.

An animated TV spot in French for the contest shows a cashier scanning groceries, all of which have a price tag of zero. A French- and English-language radio spot announces “the filet mignon is zero dollars, the orange juice is zero dollars, mayonnaise zero dollars…”

Drawings for the one year’s worth of groceries are being conducted on a regular basis during the campaign while the grand prize will be drawn at the end of the contest.


Weekly winners will be promoted on IGA’s website. There will be a special promotion for the grand prize winner, but details have not been finalized.

Terroux says the $5,200 amount of free groceries is based on Statistics Canada data that the average person spends $50 a week on groceries, or $2,600 a year. Sobeys Quebec used an average two-person household to come up with its prize giveaway total.



Customers have been “pleasantly surprised” about the size of the contest, he says. More than 200,000 people have seen an ad for the campaign on social media and several thousand “liked” it on the IGA Facebook page.

IGA has dropped, at least temporarily, its gift of the week promotion in which customers obtained a free product if they spent $70 or more on groceries.

Terroux says IGA changes its promotions regularly but that if shoppers enjoy the current contest, there’s a good chance it will return in a similar form.

“The overall idea is to thank customers by surprising them,” he says.