Supermarket group Ahold said on Wednesday it had generated an increase in both sales and net profit in the first three months of 2016, partly due to successful give-away campaigns in the Netherlands.

Group sales rose 4.3% to €11.7bn compared with the first three months of 2015, while net profit rose from €213m to €241m.

In the Netherlands, where Ahold operates the market leader Albert Heijn, sales rose 4.9%. This, the company said, is partly due to the success of its vegetable garden and cutlery promotional schemes.

‘We gave away 74 million seed packages,’ chief executive Dick Boer is quoted as saying by the Financieele Dagblad. ‘And that brought more people to the shops.’

Boer also said Ahold is on target to complete the merger with Belgium’s Delhaize supermarket group by the middle of this year.