Purina One Smartblends

Meet Wyatt, The Wonder Dog. He's our 4 year old black lab that I truly think he thinks he is part goat. He loves eating fabric - baby wash cloths are his favorite. I 'find' them out in the yard... Anyways - for as much of a goat this dog is, he is very sensitive to certain types of dog food. Through trail and error we found that Chicken and Chicken byproducts are the products that bring this dog to have a puke fest all over the carpet or explosive diahrea. Lovely. When I was going through numerous different foods to try and find that one for him, I tried a bag of Purina One Smartblends Lamb and Rice. Problem solved! His coat became glossy again, he gained back some weight (he lost an unhealthy amount during his puke/crap fests), he kept his food down and seemed happy. Apparently, unknown to me at the time, this was a new line from Purina. I was just starting to coupon around this time and found that there were a ton of coupons out there for it. Then when I discovered the art of stacking, I was thrilled!

Most of the time, it is better to buy larger bags to get the best value for your money. But not always - as in this case.

The coupons that were floating around for this line of food were/are as follows:
$2.50 off exp 12/31/11
$2.50 off exp June 2012
$4.00 off exp 1/31/12
$5.00 off - various expiry dates (these came from Save.ca, so it depended on when you ordered them)
All of these coupons have different UPCs and there are no restrictive language that would make them not stackable at either London Drugs or Save on Foods.

The 16kg bags are usually priced between $35-42 each.
The 2.7kg bags are usually priced between $13.99-11.99

With stacking, you can't exceed the price of the product, so your stacks have to come at or below the price of the item. London Drugs only carries the 2.7kg bags and while Save on Foods carries the 16kg, they are generally one of the more expensive places to buy it from. The whole goal of couponing is to get the item for the lowest possible price through the combination of both coupons and sale prices. And when I did the math, it did not make sense to go after the 16 kg bags. Here's why:

Lets say that all the above coupons were still valid for argument sake. I could stack $14 towards a 16 kg bag that is priced at $41.99.
$41.99 - $14.00 = $27.99
$27.99 divided by 16 = $1.75 / kg

Now, seeing that the $14 would exceed the value of the 2.7 kg product, I have to remove one of the $2.50 coupons out of the equation, leaving me $11.50 to stack.
$13.99 - $11.50 = $2.49
$2.49 divided by 2.7 = $0.92 / kg

So I'm paying $0.83 / kg more for the larger bag. Smaller is better in this case.

Save On Foods recently had a sale of the food for $11.99 for the 2.7 kg bag. I went in on the 15% off Tuesday and got a raincheck because their shelves were cleared of the product.

Through vigerous trading on Smart Canucks, I managed to secure all the coupons I needed for my stacks. I had plently of the $2.50 ones, someone gave me a bunch of the $4.00 ones (I ran out of the ones I found this summer) and I traded hard for the $5.00 ones from save.ca They are harder to get because they are one per household - if they were ordered during the ordering period. All in all, I managed to get 18 of the $5.00 coupons. So I was able to stack 18 bags of Dog Food for $11.99 plus 15% off!

Here's the math:
18 x $11.99 = $215.82
18 x $11.50 = $207.00
$215.82 - $207.00 = $8.82
$8.82 - $1.32 (15% off) = $7.50

So, I paid $7.50 for 18 bags of Dog Food! 48.6 kgs of food for $7.50 equals to be $0.15 a kilogram! How awesome is that? Of course, I had to pay the GST on the full price of the food - so my GST portion equaled to $10.79 for a grand total of $18.29. So, a little over a $1 a bag.

So, Wyatt... how about leaving Big B's sleepers, wash cloths and my socks be? You're good to go for a few months!