Penny Experiment

Welcome to Penny Experiment — an attempt to turn a found penny on the ground into $1 million worth of food for food banks. If this is your first visit here, please take a moment to learn how Penny Experiment started and how Penny Experiment works. If you would like to participate in Penny Experiment, there are a number of ways that you can help. Please also consider becoming a fan on facebook and follow Penny Experiment on twitter. I hope that you will support this experiment in any way that you can, and feel free to ask any questions that you may have.

Jeffrey Strain

If you shop at Safeway this week (7/21 – 7/27), be sure to go to the dairy section to see if the Kraft shredded cheese has $1.00 off 1 coupons. If they do, pick up some free cheese for yourself and your local food bank. These coupons are in some stores, but not all. This is how the deal works.

Kraft shredded cheese (2 cups) is currently marked at $1.99 each or $9.95 for 5 packages. There currently is a Catalina coupon deal (these are the coupons that you get from the register after you pay) that is worth $5.00 toward anything on your next purchase:

So $9.95 – $5.00 = $4.95

In addition, in some stores there are Kraft shredded cheese packages that have $1.00 off 1 peelie coupons stuck on them:

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Things have been a bit quiet for the last couple of months, but that wasn’t due to me forgetting about this project in any way. In fact, I embarked on a Eating Well ON $1 A Day Challenge which I hope will ultimately bring a lot more publicity to Penny Experiment (I’m currently on day 64 having spent $40.01 on food).

While I had initially hoped that the coupon bloggers would be able to help me get to the final goal (they have done a fantastic job and have already done more than their fair share in helping this experiment along), the reality is that they are quite busy with their own blogging and there are a limited number of them out there so I needed to come up with a new strategy.

That new strategy is to teach anyone that wants to learn how to greatly reduce their grocery bill how I have been able to eat well on $1 a day. In doing that, they will end up getting some food for free which they may not need, and they can then pass this food onto their local food banks. Since there are far more people that want to learn how to reduce their shopping costs than coupon bloggers, I am hoping that over time we can find enough people to help out that will eventually get Penny Experiment to $1 million worth of food donated to food banks.

I do have a backlog of updates to get up (more penny art work, penny for your thought books and updates and food bank deliveries) and hopefully you will being seeing multiple posts going up beginning this weekend. I just wanted to send a quick shoutout to all that have helped thus far that all the little things have added up (over $13,000 worth of food donated!) and it has been greatly appreciated. I hope that we can do even more in the months to come.

The Mall of Fan — DJG

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It has truly amazed me the number of people that have wanted to participate in this penny experiment. Even more amazing is that many of them live outside the US. Book #34 (there are still books numbers available if you would like to launch one into the world) was recently launched in Australia by Roxane Knott:

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I was long overdue to make a food bank delivery since it was getting difficult for me to walk around my room with all the cereal that was piled up:

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I sometimes get comments that the food that I donate isn’t always the most nutritious food. It is true that when sugary cereals go on sale and I can get them for free / nearly free, I will buy them. After talking with the coordinators of the local food banks, they would rather have the food than nothing at all. That being said, I also want to get the most nutritious food as possible and will always opt for the healthiest of the choices I have.

Since I have a bunch of catalina coupons still left over from other purchases that I will need to use up in the coming weeks, I decided to use some of them to buy Kashi cereal (something that even my sister would approve of). I had $1 off 1 peelie coupons for Kashi cereal that I found on the boxes and with last week’s cereal sale, that made them $1 per box. Then using the extra catalina coupons, they ended up being free. I ended up getting 4 boxes of Corn Flakes and 16 boxes of Kashi cereal with a retail value of $88.28 worth of food for $0.00:

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From May 12th to the 14th, Safeway had a sale where Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were free after coupons (in fact, it was actually a $1.00 money maker requiring me fill in other things which I also will donate), so I desperately scrounged up all the coupons I could find and hit the stores hard each day. The entire outing left me with 81 grocery store receipts:

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I needed to make a purchase because the $0.75 off catalina coupons I had gotten on the first day of the Philadelphia cream cheese mini purchase were expiring. I was hoping to use them to get some more great cereal deals, but Safeway hasn’t had much in that area the last two weeks, so I chose the best I could which was CapriSun Sunrise juice. There was a $1 off 1 CapriSun Sunrise juice coupon in the 4/25 SmartSource Sunday newspaper insert and I had 35 of these available to me.

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Tomorrow is Stamp Out Hunger day where mail carriers across the nation will be picking up non perishable food at your mailbox and taking it to local food banks in your area. Even though I am spending the month of May eating on $1 a day, I have some extra food that I can spare for this cause – a can of Pork & Beans and a box of Corn Flakes:

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Pennies can make a difference. Never underestimate the effect they can have.

Video sent in by Robin