The £300 Million Already in the Wild: Why Foodie Favourites Is the Low-Risk Win for Pubs

Most pubs think about gift cards as something they sell. You set up a store, list a few values, and hope guests buy them, mostly in the run up to Christmas. That is worth chasing, but it misses a much bigger pot: money already bought and looking for somewhere to be spent.

In a recent webinar on Foodie Favourites, David Walsh of Blackhawk Network put a number on it. Blackhawk Network expects to load close to £340 million onto its range of gift cards across the UK this year, up from £302 million in 2025. That is money sitting in wallets, drawers and glove boxes on cards like One4all, waiting for the right place to be spent. David has been in gift cards since 2007 and spent years on the board of the UK Gift Card and Voucher Association, so he knows where the money goes.

Here is the part that matters most for hospitality. Gift card sales are a hockey stick, spiking hard in November and December, then falling away. But sales are not redemptions, and redemptions are what get a diner through your doors. Most Christmas cards go straight under the tree and are barely touched in December.

David said roughly 19 to 20% of all redemptions land in January, easing to around 16 to 18% in February and 12% in March, then settling at 8 to 10% every month after that. What does that mean for a pub? Your festive trade peaks in December, then January and February go quiet. That is exactly when the gift card money comes alive, feeding your slowest weeks rather than your busiest, right across the year.

Redemption also works firmly in a pub’s favour. A gift card feels like free money, so people spend beyond the balance: the steak instead of the burger, the better bottle of wine, the extra round. David noted the average uplift across all sectors sits around 50%, with restaurants and pubs seeing more. A card worth £28 does not bring £28 of trade. It brings a table, and one inclined to treat itself.

David also shared a lovely idea he calls the spectrum of intimacy: the closer you are to someone, the more specific the gift. For a partner you buy the exact thing. One step out, for a sister, a friend or a couple at a wedding, you want to send a message but with room to choose, and that is where Foodie Favourites lands. It is the card people buy for a known food lover, precisely the guest a good pub kitchen wants walking in.

So how do you tap it? You need not sell a single card to benefit. David’s advice was to treat the network as a sales channel in its own right: Blackhawk Networkdesigns the cards, runs the research, merchandises them in Tesco and pushes them through employee reward schemes and its own website. Your job is simply to be listed, so your pub is an option when someone chooses where to spend.

He calls it the benefit-led choice because the downside is close to nothing. No upfront cost, no hardware, no staff training and no change to your till. You hand over your merchant ID, Blackhawk Networkruns a quick test transaction, and you go live. The card runs on Visa rails, so the money lands in your bank within a couple of days, and Toggle invoices the commission monthly. You only pay when someone spends with you.

And it does not eat into the gift cards you sell yourself. As Dan Brookman pointed out on the call, your own customers will always buy direct when they want to gift your brand. Foodie Favourites reaches the One4all customer, someone who would never have thought to visit until your name appeared on their card.

So if you run a pub and are weighing it up, three things are worth doing this month.

1) Get listed on Foodie Favourites, so your venue appears where those cards can be spent.

2) Make your listing work hard, with a strong description and a link back to your own site.

3) Plan a little around Q1, when redemptions peak, so the extra footfall lands on the covers you actually want to fill.

None of it is heavy lifting. As David said, most operators who join stay, and what surprises them most is how much more people spend once the card is in their pocket.

This article draws on insights shared by David Walsh of Blackhawk Network in the “Foodie Favourites: The Benefit Led Choice for Pubs” webinar. Watch the full session here:

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