High-value coupons require attentiveness

If you are trying to find high-value coupons for food products, you usually have limited options, other than the Sunday paper.

One is to request as many free samples as you possibly can. Nearly 99 percent of the time, free samples will come with high-value coupons off the item you are trying. This can result in some cheap products when combined with a sale (or better yet a sale and a store coupon on top of that with your manufacturer coupon). Another way is to hit your local coupon blogs a couple of times a day and see if a company comes out with a special promo coupon for print. These coupons are usually high-value and are available for print for a very short period of time. Sometimes you will literally have hours before a coupon prints out and is unavailable for print thereafter.

Companies will also have special promotions that are only available for a certain period of time to request via snail mail. If you are lucky, you can hit these offers on the Internet just right so you can request them. That is how I was able to request a recipe booklet from Jennie O turkey a couple of months ago (it was available to the first 20,000 to request it and was only available for an hour), which came with a $5 coupon on any Jennie O product.

I then used that coupon to get a whole bunch of ground turkey at Wal-Mart when it went on rollback for free. These coupons are rare, but are wonderful when you are able to hit the offer just right and request them. This is where your coupon blogs are invaluable. This is especially true for Alaska, where we have three coupon blogs that you can view at any given time, so if one coupon blogger is offline, odds are another will catch a great limited-time offer and post it up for you.

Another way to get high-value coupons is to join organizations like Vocalpoint (covered in last week’s column). One such organization that I have joined in the last six months is Kraft First Taste (www.kraftfirsttaste.com). Kraft First Taste is run by, of course, Kraft and every three weeks or so it seems there is a high-value coupon available for print or they are offering a sample of a product (via a snail mail free coupon). I have only received one offer for free products from them, but I have gotten several very nice high-value coupons from them. Just this last week I was offered a $2 for one Wheat Thins coupon, which I printed off and used at Target to get a box of Wheat Thins for 54 cents (although it turned out free after coupon overage from other items I’d purchased).

I would recommend joining Kraft First Taste to anyone who wants to receive high-value coupons and to, as always, go to your coupon blogs for tips on what offers are available.

Erika Buswell runs a blog dedicated to bargain hunting in Alaska (alaskanbargainhunter.blogspot.com) and lives in Palmer with her husband and two children.