LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's competition regulator said on Wednesday that supermarket prices offered through loyalty schemes do provide genuine savings.

Loyalty schemes have proved hugely successful for the UK's biggest supermarkets, including market leader Tesco and No. 2 Sainsbury's, offering significantly lower prices for members.

The vast majority of customers now use them and an increasing number of products are covered by them.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which launched a review in January, said it analysed around 50,000 grocery products on promotion and found very little evidence of supermarkets inflating their "usual" prices to make loyalty promotions seem like a better deal.

"We found that almost all the loyalty prices reviewed offered genuine savings against the usual price - a fact we hope reassures shoppers throughout the UK," said George Lusty, the CMA's interim executive director of consumer protection.

(Reporting by James Davey, editing by Paul Sandle)