The National Lottery will start selling £5 chocolate-scented scratch-and-sniff scratchcards in an attempt to boost flatlining sales.
The sweet-smelling lottery card – which offers a maximum prize of £500 – is the first of its kind in the UK, and will be available at 8,000 retail outlets.
The launch by the National Lottery was inspired by the Czech Republic, which launched gingerbread-scented scratchcards back in 2017.
It comes after the Gambling Commission in 2022 signed a 10-year contract for Czech-owned Allwyn to take over the National Lottery’s operator Camelot.
Allwyn bid chairman Sir Keith Mills had said: ‘In our bid proposals we set out our plans to win back customers that have stopped playing and to bring a new generation of players to the National Lottery by introducing new games and technology to capture the imagination of the nation.’
But anti-gambling campaigners are worried that the new cards will attract younger players, and have drawn parallels to flavoured vapes catering.
National Lottery’s operator, however, introduced an in-store cap this month which will only allow buyers to purchase 10 scratchcards at a time, to ensure excessive play is minimized.
The launch of the scratchcards come just a week after a supermarket worker was warned she could be sent to prison after conning the National Lottery of nearly £50,000.
Melanie Davies admitted carrying out a scam which netted her £47,000 while working as a till cashier at a branch of Asda.
Davies tampered with winning tickets on a number of occasions to defraud the lottery company out of the money.
The 35-year-old, from Brechin, Angus, admitted to repeatedly pretending to the National Lottery that higher sums were due to be paid out on tickets.
Dundee Sheriff Court heard she was working at Asda’s Milton of Craigie store between August 2022 and July 2023 when the fraud took place.
Fiscal depute Sam Craib told the court Davies had no previous convictions. Sheriff Neil Kinnear deferred sentence until November 4 for background reports.