Best Credit Cards to Use For Groceries

💳 This is part of the “The Best Cards to Use” series. Tap here for more great cards to use in other areas of spend!

Cost of living is on the rise, and using a good credit card can offset most if not all of the price increases we face these days. If you’re not using a these credit cards for your groceries, you may be leaving as much as 8% discount on the table. Ouch.

Citi Cash Back

Perhaps the easiest card to use on this list, the Citi Cash Back gives a generous 8% cashback for groceries. You also get 8% cashback on petrol, and 6% on dining, making this a very useful card indeed. The only thing you need to do is to spend at least $800 a month to hit the minimum spend, and the cashback maxes out at $80 ($1,000 spend at 8% earn rate).

CIMB Visa Signature

The CIMB Visa Signature card is an interesting one: it promises 10% cashback on things like groceries, online shopping, and beauty & wellness which are ordinary, daily expenses for most people. The trouble is that it also includes less common areas of spend such as pet expenses as well as cruise transactions. Coupled with sublimits on each category, the card requires you to spend on at least 4 different categories to reach the 10% earn rate.

Nevertheless, there are ways to milk a good earn rate from this card, though it’s obviously easier for pet owners, and you can take a look at my full review for some ideas.

UOB One

UOB One may have been nerfed repeatedly over the past couple of years, but it’s the one card you should look at if you spend a lot on Dairy Farm merchants which include familiar names like Cold Storage, Giant, 7-11 and more under its stable of supermarkets. You get an advertised rate of 10% cashback, although due to cashback caps the maximum you’d get is 8.33% even if your spend is entirely made up of expenses at selected merchants giving the 10% earn rate.

Maybank Family and Friends

Cashback users should be familiar with the 8% Maybank Family and Friends which give you a choice of many useful categories to pick from. Its 8% cashback on groceries doesn’t seem too impressive given how it’s pretty much on par with the 3 cards I’ve mentioned earlier, but Maybank F&F gives its high cashback on many other categories which may not be able to get such a high earn rate. Tap here for a full review of the card.

Trust Card

We can’t talk about supermarkets in Singapore without thinking about NTUC FairPrice, and we can’t talk about credit cards to use at FairPrice without discussing Trust Card. 21% rebate seems too good to be true, and analysing the card in greater detail proves this adage.

Nonetheless, Trust Card gives you an opportunity to earn about 7 to 8% rebates on your FairPrice expenditure as well as your ordinary, non-FairPrice spend. As mentioned, 8% isn’t much to shout about for grocery spend, but it is quite a bit for non-grocery transactions.

OCBC 365

OCBC 365 is a curious entry in this list, giving just 3% cashback on groceries. It’s inclusion here is owed to its companion account – OCBC 360 – which now gives as much as 4.65% p.a. on $100,000 balance.

Of the interest rate, 0.60% p.a. comes from achieving the Spend category which involves spending at least $500 on an eligible OCBC credit card. That’s roughly $50 in monthly interest for a $100,000 balance, and enough to knock out even high-earning cashback cards if you have a high balance in your 360 Account.

Miles cards

Sorry miles people, but the hard truth is that cashback cards dominate the groceries space. The best miles card get you 4 miles per dollar which is not an attractive earn rate when it’s up against 8% cashback. Giving up 8 cents for every dollar you spend for 4 miles is as good as buying each mile for 2 cents, and that’s even more expensive than paying many credit cards’ $192.60 annual fee for 10,000 miles (1.926 cent per mile). There are far cheaper ways to “buy” miles, and you are better off using an 8% cashback card for your groceries, then using that cashback to procure miles instead.

For those insistent on using miles for groceries, the usual 4 mpd cards like HSBC Revolution, UOB Preferred Platinum Visa (take note that Giant and Cold Storage do not earn miles for UOB cards), and CitiRewards paired with Instarem Amaze would apply for buying your groceries in person. Online cards like DBS Woman World MasterCard would also give 4 miles per dollar if you buy your groceries online.

Conclusion

Don’t forget to also use your supermarket chain’s loyalty programme to get more rewards when you pay for your groceries, and stay subscribed if you want a review on the newly released yuu card and programme which seems to be DBS and Dairy Farm’s response to the Trust Card.

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