When the going gets tough, Stephanie Nelson goes shopping.

Armed with a clipboard and a printout that shows everything she will buy and the rock-bottom price she'll pay for it, she strides purposefully around a Kroger produce department, looking for markdowns. By the end of her spin through the supermarket, she'll spend $28.83 and take home $69.61 of groceries, most of them discounted significantly even before they hit the cashier stand.

Pouya Dianat / pdianat@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Stephanie Nelson, founder of couponmom.com, saves money by buying only what's on sale.

Pouya Dianat / pdianat@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Nelson wouldn't think of going grocery shopping without a list and coupons.

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"I am going to spend some money with you," she assures the store manager.

"Just not a whole lot."

As food prices have soared, many shoppers have started searching for deals. Nelson makes a living at it.

As Coupon Mom, she snags incredible bargains with a click of her mouse, and spreads word of the discounts to nearly a million online users each month.

A marketing professional turned stay-at-home mom, Nelson reinvented herself yet again when her youngest son, now 12, started kindergarten. She started with a simple wish: To convince more people to donate to food banks. She wound up building a thriving business on coupon-clipping, a pastime that until last year was rapidly falling out of favor.

Now Stephanie's husband, Dave, makes sure their two sons get to football practice and other appointments while Nelson brings home the bacon (most likely bought on sale, with a coupon).

Bad times for the economy are boom times for couponing. Shoppers redeemed 2.6 billion coupons in 2007, the first year without a decline in use since 1992, according to the clearinghouse CMS Inc. in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Nelson's free Web site, CouponMom.com, is one place they can get them. The site offers one-stop deal shopping customized by state. Registered users can check out sale prices from supermarkets, drug stores and mass merchandisers in their neighborhood, matched with coupon deals from circulars distributed in local newspapers. Wal-Mart, Kroger, Publix, Target and CVS/Pharmacy are among the stores covered.

Savings range from a few cents to the jackpot: Free stuff. Nelson makes sure to put "charity" next to the best deals, to encourage site users to donate some of their deals to food banks. In a survey of site users, 48 percent reported giving away food, she says.

The Web site started as CutOutHunger.org. Nelson convinced grocery stores in her neighborhood to set up collection barrels where shoppers could donate items bought at a deep discount. She hauled the donations to food banks. To publicize the Web site, she walked around East Cobb supermarkets wearing a Cut Out Hunger T-shirt.

"She's a very driven lady," says Barbara Duffy, executive director of North Fulton Community Charities, which has benefited from Nelson's financial donations and grass-roots advocacy for food donations.

"When she got focused on this need, she went at it in a way I hadn't seen anybody go at it before. Stephanie was making it possible for people to donate without breaking their own personal budget."

In its early days, the Web site drew 15 users a week. In June, it attracted 916,000 unique visitors, according to Nielsen Online, ranking it 24th among coupon sites. Coupons.com was No. 1, with 7.8 million visitors. Her main competition, though, is The Grocery Game, a site that charges users a $60 annual fee for similar sale price information for one grocery store. Nelson can't resist checking on the competition daily, looking at a Web site that measures traffic to both.

"I was this obsessed before I made money," she says. "Now I am because it's fun."

When Nelson made the first of many appearances on ABC's "Good Morning America" in 2004, site traffic shot up. She changed the name to CouponMom.com at the suggestion of one of the show's producers. Traffic kept growing.

As the economy tanked in the past year and food prices spiked, so did the number of visitors.

Nelson won't disclose site revenue, which come from advertising and coupon fees. (She earns 3 cents for each coupon that a user prints.) She does say it has more than replaced the six-figure incomes that both she and her husband made in previous jobs.

An admirer of Clark Howard and debt-free-lifestyle guru Dave Ramsey, Nelson keeps saving. The Web site made no money in its first four years, and those memories are still fresh.

But revenue doubled in the past year, and Nelson bought herself a new Honda Accord. She no longer worries about saving up for family vacations. Beside salaries for herself and Dave, who is a vice president, CouponMom.com employs 10 part-time workers.

"I'm still thinking, 'Is this going to last?'" she says, glancing around her office, a tidy, sparsely furnished bonus room above her garage. "You can tell I don't have much overhead here."

On this spin through a Kroger near her home, Nelson wears a bright pink sweater and white capris. Instead of T-shirt ads, she now relies on viral messaging, blogs and media interviews to spread the word about her Web site.

Nelson doesn't need to cut costs on groceries anymore, but she can't resist. It's a challenge, and a way to stay in touch with the site's users. She still collects CVS/Pharmacy sale data herself and enters it on the Web site each week, and her car trunk is filled now with cereal bought on deep discounts there that she will give to a food bank.

Walking through the supermarket with Nelson shows a professional at the top of her game. She picks up broccoli crowns on sale, guacamole that'll be free with a coupon, and switches her meal plan to accommodate marked-down Angus ground beef. With a separate coupon for another 20 percent off the beef, it's too good a deal to walk past.

In May, Nelson decided to see if she could cut her weekly grocery bill from around $125 to $100 and still feed her family healthfully. She got it down to $82. With 12- and 15-year-old sons to feed, that's no simple task.

Still, there are two things she admits she'd pay full price for: Boca Burgers, which she eats every day for lunch, and Diet Coke. She started eating the vegetable burgers thanks to, what else, a coupon deal, and got hooked.

That's always a risk. On this day, she picks up two half-gallon jugs of flavored tea, on sale for $1 a jug. She's got two coupons, good for $1 off. A freebie for her boys.

"But here's what will happen," she says as she puts it in an overflowing cart. "They'll like it, and next week it'll be $2."