Ziploc revived expired coupons with a Ziploc-in-cart condition

Grocery coupons expire constantly, and once they do, retailers and manufacturers treat them as gone — the standard response is a reminder email before expiration, or nothing at all after. For shoppers, an expired coupon is a small, forgettable loss; for brands, it's a missed transaction and a slightly worse opinion of the retailer, with no mechanism to recover either side of that.

Ziploc, a preservation brand by category — bags and containers people buy specifically to keep things from expiring — had no obvious operational connection to coupon logistics. But the metaphor was sitting right there: a brand whose entire product category is about not letting things go to waste, applied to a kind of waste nobody had thought to preserve.

Ziploc built PreservedPromos.com: shoppers upload a photo of any expired food coupon — competitor brand or Ziploc's own, from any retailer — and receive a new discount worth up to $4, redeemable at major retailers, on the condition that a Ziploc product is in the cart at checkout.

Ziploc built PreservedPromos.com: upload any expired food coupon, get a new discount redeemable only with a Ziploc in the cart, turning a universal annoyance into a sale.

Accepting any expired coupon made the tool genuinely useful, not a gimmick.

Requiring a Ziploc product in the cart aligned the shopper's savings goal with a purchase.

The metaphor of preservation made the brand's involvement feel authentic.

The low bar of adding one product avoided bait-and-switch backlash.

Find a universal, brand-agnostic annoyance and fix it for free, but condition the fix on a purchase to convert goodwill into sales.

A 14% increase in new buyers, a 49% redemption rate, a 61% increase in Ziploc's share of voice, and participation from more than 80 retail partners spanning over 65,000 stores, according to both official sources read for this case. 'Preserved Promos' won the Creative Commerce Grand Prix and four additional Cannes Lions in 2025, and is cited in retail-marketing coverage as a model for converting a universal, brand-agnostic annoyance — expired coupons — into a proprietary customer-acquisition channel.