Enhancing Nando's loyalty programme

The Challenge

Nando's Rewards had become a victim of its own success. While millions of customers were collecting Chillies towards free PERi-PERi, the experience still relied on a physical plastic card that created unnecessary friction.

Cards were forgotten, lost or replaced, forcing customers to restart their progress and leading to frustration with the programme. Registration rates stalled, engagement suffered, and the scheme generated significant operational overhead, from replacing lost cards to managing fragmented customer data.

At the same time, customer expectations had shifted. Mobile wallets, contactless payments and digital-first experiences were becoming the norm, while Nando's own sustainability ambitions made continuing to produce plastic loyalty cards increasingly difficult to justify.

The opportunity wasn't simply to digitise a loyalty card. It was to redesign the entire loyalty experience around how customers actually interact with the brand today.

The results

The result was the UK's first NFC-enabled restaurant loyalty card available directly in Apple Wallet, allowing customers to earn and redeem rewards simply by tapping their phone at the till.

Behind the scenes, delivering that seemingly effortless interaction required complex engineering across web services, mobile platforms, point-of-sale integrations, transactional communications and entirely new NFC hardware. Working closely with Apple and specialist hardware partners, we helped pioneer technology that had not previously been deployed for loyalty programmes in the UK or Ireland.

Alongside the wallet experience, we also redesigned registration, messaging and the underlying loyalty infrastructure, creating a future-ready platform capable of supporting continued innovation while embedding agile, customer-centred ways of working across the programme.

Red Badger is the product transformation consultancy for blue chips. Our product design capabilities and technical pedigree build high-performance digital platforms that get you closer to your customers and embed new ways of working. Your journey to an agile, innovative digital product organisation starts today.