(The Brownsville Herald) Brew a better cup of coffee and the world will beat a path to your door. (Click HERE for full story.)

Hard times turn coupon clipping into the newest extreme sport
(The Wall Street Journal) Under a futon in her Charleston, S.C., apartment, Stacy Smith has stashed boxes of soy bars, bags of potato chips, bottles of vitamin water, canned vegetables, soup, barbecue sauce and antibacterial wipes. Her bedroom closet is jammed with soda and shampoo, her bookcase with garlic salt and meat marinades.

No, Ms. Smith isn't stocking up for a hurricane. The 39-year-old's apartment is stuffed with groceries because she's one of a growing flock of "extreme couponers."

These discount devotees have formed vast online communities that collectively unearth and swap digital, mobile-phone and paper coupons. The cleverest shoppers combine dozens of coupons and go from store to store buying items in quantity, getting stuff free of charge.

"If you can get 100 packs of toilet paper for free, you're going to," says Erin Libranda, 38. When the resident of Katy, Texas, has amassed enough coupons to buy many months' supply of eggs, she puts tiny cracks in them, adds lemon juice and freezes them.

Jill Lansky, 34, of Kalamazoo, Mich., likes to amuse friends by opening a cupboard to reveal 150 bottles of Powerade she bought for 25 cents each, thanks to coupons she collected on CouponForum.com.

Proud shoppers post photos of themselves posing with their latest hauls. Nathan Engels of Villa Hills, Ky., can't resist loading up on free products. Mr. Engels recently erected a 6-foot-tall tower featuring the 1,142 packages of Jell-O he had got for nothing. He brags about his jam-packed freezer holding 30 pounds of meat, 50 pounds of cheese and 200 bags of vegetables.

"I'm going to buy as much as I can—I don't care if it's a year's or two-year's supply," says Mr. Engels, 28, who is married and has a young daughter.

For decades, shoppers clipped coupons from newspaper circulars, magazines and coupon booklets. Redemptions peaked in the early 1990s, and couponing gradually declined as grocers launched loyalty-card programs that rewarded repeat shoppers with discounts.

But amid the recession last year, the number of coupons redeemed rose 27%, to 3.3 billion from 2.6 billion in 2008, says Inmar Inc., a coupon-processing agent. The year-over-year percentage increase was the largest since Inmar started tracking the statistic more than 20 years ago.

Fueling the increase isn't the general populace but heavy coupon users, people who redeem 104 or more coupons over six months, according to an August report by The Nielsen Co. These users tend to be females under the age of 54 with college degrees and household incomes above $70,000, Nielsen says.

The upsurge mirrors the growth of Web sites dedicated to couponing. CouponMom.com, which appeals to a broad range of savers, has 2.2 million members, up from one million last January, says site founder Stephanie Nelson, author of the book, "The Coupon Mom's Guide to Cutting Your Grocery Bills in Half."

Hotcouponworld.com, which has seen its membership grow to 200,000 from 80,000 in the past year, targets couponers who think "there's an economic value in buying all your peanut butter for the year in one week in September," says site founder Julie Parrish, 35, of West Linn, Ore. Two years ago, she bought 50 18-ounce jars of Skippy creamy peanut butter for 17 cents each; last September, she paid 35 cents each. At retail, they cost around $3.59.

Ms. Smith, the Charleston woman whose closet doubles as a pantry, says she disliked grocery shopping until she got laid off last year from her clerical job and, to economize, turned to couponing Web sites. On two recent trips to her local supermarket, she says she paid $5 for $78 worth of items, and $2 for $40 worth of goods.

When Ms. Libranda, the Texas shopper, needed 500 coupons for flavored water last summer, she posted a request at Hotcouponworld.com. Within days, she had exchanged postage stamps and cereal box tops with half a dozen other members. "We had free water for a long time," Ms. Libranda says.

All the deal making isn't great for grocers, some of which have seen their profits squeezed by discounting. Craig Herkert, chief executive of Supervalu Inc., operator of Jewel, Albertson's and other supermarkets, recently told analysts that shoppers with an eye for discounts were "executing with surgical precision."

Carrie Petersen of Columbia, Md., says she tries not to abuse discounts. Recently, Ms. Petersen, 38, took 50-cent coupons for meat seasonings to a number of supermarkets that were doubling the coupons' value. Because the seasonings were already on sale for $1 each, Ms. Petersen got them for nothing.

Instead of scooping piles of packets into her shopping cart, she bought just five at a time at each of the stores she visited. "I never clear the shelf: I don't think that's right," Ms. Peterson says. "I probably only got 30."

Bringing home huge piles of stuff doesn't always work out. Julie Felton, a 39-year-old respiratory therapist from San Marcos, Texas, says she was ecstatic when she combined 20 coupons from a retailer and a manufacturer to get $5 bags of dog food for nothing—a six-month supply.

Ms. Felton's dog didn't like the food. Neither did her cat, nor the deer that wander into her yard.

She wound up donating it to a local animal shelter.

Ethnic beauty: Green, crossover products big hits
(Marketing Daily) It's certainly no news that the demand for ethnic beauty products has been exploding, with annual sales of hair, makeup and skincare products now totaling $2.7 billion a year, says a new report from Packaged Facts. (Click HERE for full story.)

Sugar gains favor on labels
(The Wall Street Journal) High fructose corn syrup, the sugar alternative used to sweeten sodas, cookies, condiments and cereals, is beginning to lose some ground in the packaged-food industry.

More big-name food and beverage products—including Kraft Foods Inc.'s Wheat Thins —have begun dropping the ingredient in favor of sugar, despite a big difference in cost, saying they are responding to consumer preferences for ingredients perceived as more natural.

ConAgra Foods Inc. in May will start replacing the sweetener with sugar in its Hunt's tomato ketchup. "That's what consumers are looking for—simpler ingredient listings and ingredients they are familiar with," ConAgra spokeswoman Teresa Paulsen said. ConAgra said consumers preferred the taste of the new product in tests.

In recent months, Kraft has taken high fructose corn syrup out of the recipes for its 100-calorie pack Nabisco cookies, Wheat Thins crackers and most of its namesake salad dressings. With Wheat Thins, Kraft said it saw discussions on its Web site on the subject of high fructose corn syrup and received comments directly from consumers, pushing it to remove the sweetener.

PepsiCo Inc. is in the process of replacing high fructose corn syrup in Gatorade products with sugar and other sweeteners. Pepsi said its research showed many athletes preferred the idea of Gatorade without the syrup.

Many consumers worry that HFCS is worse for them than sugar. Some critics call high fructose corn syrup an artificial sweetener, as it is heavily processed, even though many experts say there is little nutritional difference between it and sugar.

The move away from HFCS, combined with lower consumption of soft drinks, has weighed on U.S. sales of the sweetener at manufacturers such as Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Corn Products International Inc.

Archer Daniels Midland, which declined to comment, doesn't break out sales of U.S. high fructose corn syrup. On a recent conference call, however, the company said U.S. volumes for the corn-sweetener industry have been lower, reflecting a drop in consumption of carbonated soft drinks. ADM said on the call that it is counting on better sales in markets such as Mexico to help offset declines in the U.S.

Corn Products International didn't respond to calls on this subject.

Consumption of high fructose corn syrup fell 1.3% in 2009 in the U.S. from a year earlier, according to research firm Euromonitor.

The Corn Refiners Association has been running television ads that try to counter the perception that the syrup is inferior. On its Web site, www.sweetsurprise.com, the association says high fructose corn syrup "is simply a kind of corn sugar. It has the same number of calories as sugar and is handled similarly by the body."

Audrae Erickson, president of the Corn Refiners Association, said, "This is nothing more than a marketing gimmick," referring to packaged-food companies that switch ingredients. "They've switched from one sugar to another," Ms. Erickson said. She argues that eventually consumers will end up paying more.

Sales of high fructose syrup have been pressured for some years as many Americans have moved away from sodas, which are heavy users of the sweetener. But experts say that the sweetener's prices have now also come under pressure in the U.S. amid the recent shifts by branded food and beverage makers. In the Midwest, high fructose corn syrup has been selling for 16.75 cents a pound on average, said Ron Sterk, editor of trade publication Milling and Baking News, down three cents from last year.

As they try to hold onto market share, companies shifting to sugar from HFCS say they aren't raising prices for consumers despite their higher costs for raw materials.

Early this year, the price of sugar in the U.S averaged over $1,000 a ton compared to about $695 a ton for one variety of high fructose corn syrup, LMC International economist Nick Fereday said. He puts annual consumption of sugar at nine million tons in the U.S. and corn syrup at seven million.

In 2009, use of sugar in canned, bottled and frozen foods was flat from a year ago at 427,000 tons in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Years ago, high fructose corn syrup got some bad press. One piece of research in 2004 from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Louisiana State University and University of North Carolina raised questions about whether the syrup was playing a role in the national obesity epidemic.

One of the authors of that study, University of North Carolina professor Barry Popkin, said that since then he and other researchers have concluded that regular sugar and high fructose corn syrup "have the same exact effect on obesity and diabetes and on heart disease. It's not that one is better."

More consumers are paying attention to sweeteners. Laurie Ledgard, a stay-at-home mother in Suffield, Conn., said she does look at the sugar contents and tries to avoid the syrup.

"If I have to have sugar, I'd rather have the natural sugar than high fructose corn syrup," she said. Still, she acknowledges that "there is a devil in sugar as well, and you don't want a lot of that either."

AARP's Marketing Chief Pardo: '50 is the new 50'
(Brandweek) Academy Awards viewers may have wondered why consumers in two AARP spots kept saying, “When I grow up.” (If you’re over 50, aren’t you already grown-up?) The ads, said AARP’s Emilio Pardo, actually kick off a new campaign that stresses that boomers (to borrow a phrase from Bye Bye Birdie) have “a lot of livin’ to do” and that 50 isn’t the end of youth. (Click HERE for full story.)

A vibrant culture of food blogging
(The New York Times) At Bistro 55, an upscale restaurant in Rochelle Park, the staff is accustomed not only to customers talking on cellphones, but also to people using phones to take pictures of the food, according to Lorenzo Catlett, the general manager. (Click HERE for full story.)

(Editor’s Note: CVS is tops on the list, along with Tesco, Kroger, and Safeway)
(Fortune) (Click HERE for full story.)

Tea it up!

(Convenience Store News) More c-store customers are chugging back ready-to-drink (RTD) iced tea, sometimes in place of carbonated soft drinks and even bottled water. (Click HERE for full story.)

Sargento rolls out reduced-sodium cheeses
(just-food) US cheese specialist Sargento Foods has introduced a series of reduced-sodium products targeted at health-conscious consumers in the US. (Click HERE for full story.)

Hellmann's light mayo to use cage-free eggs
(Supermarket News) Unilever will begin using 100% certified cage-free eggs in its Hellmanns' Light Mayonnaise recipe in the U.S., it announced recently. (Click HERE for full story.)