I went to M&S every day for a week—yellow sticker labels were the best at 1 time of day

Yellow sticker labels, often seen in supermarkets, mark items nearing their expiration date. These labels are often bright in colour, so they don’t go unnoticed, and the savings are often huge. This practice helps supermarkets, such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s, as well as M&S, reduce waste and allows customers to purchase items at a lower cost.

The majority of the items sold on yellow sticker labels can be frozen, such as bread, ready meals, and meat. I recently visited my local Marks and Spencer Foodhall every day for a week at different times to see when the best bargains were available, and I was super surprised with the results.

Yellow sticker label items are typically applied at different times, depending on the supermarket. However, these reductions are often put in place in the evening, shortly before closing.

On my first visit to M&S Food, I absolutely loved that the reduced items weren’t all placed together on a shelf. They were carefully distributed across the store and kept on the shelves you would usually find them in, which made it much easier to find the bargains.

On the first day, quite a few fresh goods were on discount in the pudding section, but other than that, the majority of the discounted goods had gone.

The goods on offer included some yoghurts and a handful of ready meals, including some fresh vegetables.

I also visited the store in the morning, although this was on a weekend, which could have impacted the goods on offer.

When I visited in the morning, around 9am on a Saturday and 11am on a Sunday, I didn’t really find any discounted foods, other than some bread.

I was expecting this as supermarkets don’t tend to reduce foods in the morning from what I’ve seen when shopping.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, to find lots of discounted goods when I visited at lunchtime, which was around 12:30pm.

Discounted goods included a honey-glazed gammon, which was reduced to £3.50 from £9, which I purchased to put in the freezer.

Some potato dauphinoise were also discounted to £2.64 from £4.50, and some freshly prepared vegetables were reduced to £1.64 from £3.

I purchased all of these for just £7.78 when they should have been £16.50 which was a right bargain find.

Some yoghurts also had yellow sticker labels as they were going out of date that day, as well as some mushroom and chicken ready meals and a fish and chip ready meal.

For a sweet treat I managed to find one of M&S’ new Cookie Cups reduced to £1.79 from £3 which I thought was a bargain as I wouldn’t pay £3.

I visited at this time three times over the week and found this was the best time for yellow sticker labels at my local store.

I’d highly recommend searching for yellow sticker labels when shopping as you can end up saving a lot of cash and reducing food waste.

It’s also important to note that this was just one Marks and Spencer food store, and the timings of reduced goods can differ between stores.