Trucker shares his 49-cent iced coffee recipe that ‘lasts all morning’ and frugal foodies call a ‘win’ |
Iced coffee is a must for many Americans. A 2025 survey from the National Coffee Association reported that 31% of Americans have iced coffee daily.
And Americans are shelling out their hard-earned cash for it. Data from food research firm Technomic found that in 2023, Americans spent $17.7 billion on iced coffee drinks. Coffee prices in the U.S. are also on the rise, and an August 2025 report noted that the average cost for hot coffee was $3.52, and $5.47 for cold brew.
Frugal people looking to save money on their daily coffee fix took to Reddit where a trucker shared his affordable iced coffee recipe. It’s earning major praise from his fellow frugal foodies.
49-cent iced coffee hack
User asu3dvl explained how he keeps his iced coffee costs down while on the road:
“Trucker here. Every morning I mix two tablespoons of Great Value 100% Columbian instant coffee into my 20 oz Stanley tumbler. A splash of Hazelnut creamer and add water and ice. Shake it up,” he shared.
He noted how affordable it is, as well as how “It’s like $0.49 a day, lasts me all morning and keeps me sane when I roll through your town as you people try to kill yourselves around my 40 ton 18 wheeler. 🤣🤣🤣 The coffee and the large creamer last around three weeks.”
He also added, “Tastes just as good if not better than the fresh brewed stuff we get out here, anyway.”
A former barista commented, “I worked in a coffee shop for years and I drink instant now. Its come a long way.”
@ethanrodecoffee stop overpaying for iced coffee coffee and make this instead #coffee ♬ original sound – Ethan Rode
stop overpaying for iced coffee coffee and make this instead #coffee ♬ original sound – Ethan Rode
People share their iced coffee hacks
Fellow iced coffee drinkers offered their best iced coffee tips to save money.
“I really like Cafe Altura instant coffee. They have one of the best instant coffees I’ve ever had and it’s a medium roast! It’s a bit spendy, but def less if you’re buying coffee from a coffee shop.” – 4077
“Juan Valdez makes great instant coffee too.” – jameson71
“Try Bustelo instant!” – disasterous_fjord
“I use about a cup and 1/3-ish of milk, 3 tablespoons of brown sugar, a couple of ice cubes, 2 scoops (I think they are tsp, but I have them heaping) of instant coffee. And a tiny bit of vanilla. I put it in a blender and tastes like a Tim Hortons Iced Capp. Instant coffee is super handy for iced coffee drinks! To make black coffee, I don’t like instant, but with milk and brown sugar, its so good!” – Just_Cake4512
“Cold brew concentrate is another good one for anyone who wants to level up from instant without spending starbucks money. throw ground coffee in a mason jar with water overnight, strain it in the morning, and you’ve got concentrate that lasts like a week in the fridge. cost works out to maybe 30-40 cents a cup. but honestly 49 cents a day for something that keeps you sane while driving an 18 wheeler through traffic is probably one of the best ROI purchases anyone in this sub is making lol.” – Couponpicked
“Try Taster’s Choice medium dark, next time you get a chance, also available at Walmart.” – ditto3000
“There’s a somewhat famous finance youtuber who had pretty much the same recipe for his “20 cent iced coffee” compared to coffee chains’ iced coffee:
– make a pot of coffee (i think he grinds his own beans)– put the whole pot in the fridge overnight– add mocha creamer (or whatever) to taste the next day. 20 cent (or is it 10 cent) ice coffee. save $5 (this was at the time, save more $ now).
I think the main part is the overnight icing of the coffee in the fridge. if you just add ice cubes to making it straight away its not the same.” -Silly-avocatoe
When asked to describe what Tanzania smells like, Grace Isekore closes her eyes and breathes in deep. For a moment, she’s somewhere else entirely. Tanzania is a rich tapestry of sights and scents, from the smell of sea mist that permeates the coastline to the earthy cardamom and cloves she cooks with in her kitchen. But when Grace emerges from her reverie, her answer is unexpected.
“Tanzania smells like peace,” she says, her eyes still closed. “I see a beautiful country where we are free to move, free to speak. And there is peace within the community.”
For Grace, that sense of peace isn’t just something she smells; it’s something she works toward every day. As a project coordinator with Pastoral Women’s Council (PWC), a women-led organization that empowers pastoralist communities in northern Tanzania, she has seen firsthand how girls flourish when they have the opportunity to attend school. Like scent, education not only connects girls to their own culture, but also helps broaden their horizons, realizing new possibilities for themselves and others. That transformation reshapes entire communities and ripples outward, with the potential to change countries and transform the world for the better.
Different scents, different approaches, and communities driving change
For Grace and others around the world, education is freedom, as well as a pathway to a stronger community. Rooted in that shared belief, Pura, a home fragrance company, was inspired to build on their four-year partnership with Malala Fund to create something truly unique: a fragrance collection that connects people through scent to communities in Tanzania, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Brazil, where barriers to girls’ education are among the highest.
Using ingredients from each region, the new Pura x Malala Fund Collection uses scent to transport people to these regions directly. “Future in Bloom,” for example, invokes Pakistan’s lush valleys through notes of jasmine, cedarwood, and mango; while Tanzania’s fragrance, “Heart on Fire,” evokes the spirit and joyfulness of the girls who live there through cardamom, lemon, and green tea.
The new Collection honors the work Malala Fund does every day, partnering with locally-led organizations in these four countries to ensure every girl can access and complete 12 years of education. Each scent celebrates the joy, tenacity, and courage of the women and girls driving change on the ground, while also augmenting Pura’s annual grant to Malala Fund by donating eight percent of net revenue from the Pura x Malala Fund Collection to Malala Fund directly.
Just as each country’s scent is unique, so too are their needs related to education. But with support from Malala Fund and Pura, local leaders are coming up with creative ways to mobilize entire communities (parents, teachers, elders, and the students themselves, in their pursuit of solutions, understanding that educating girls helps everyone thrive. Here’s how their efforts are creating real, durable impact in Tanzania and Pakistan, and creating a ripple effect that changes the world for the better.
Parent-teacher associations help Maasai girls and their communities in Tanzania problem-solve
Northern Tanzania, Grace’s home, is home to pastoralist communities like the Maasai, a nomadic people who have moved with the seasons to nurture the land and care for their livestock for centuries. The nomadic nature of this lifestyle creates significant and unique barriers to girls’ education. Longstanding gender roles have enabled Maasai to survive in the harsh environment and have placed great value on both women and men. Over time, as nomadic life has been threatened by the privatization of land and stationary education models have been implemented, the reality of pastoralist livelihood has shifted and introduced new complexities. Now, the sheer distance to schools is both a practical challenge and one that often comes with danger from the landscape, predators, and potential exposure to assault along the journey. Girls shoulder the responsibility of household chores and there is often cultural pressure around early marriage – both leading to boys’ education being prioritized over girls’.
“There are very, very good [pastoralist] cultural practices, which are passed from generation to generation,” says Janet Kimori, an English teacher at Lekule Girls Secondary School in Longido, Tanzania. But when cultural practices act as educational barriers, “you have to sit down and look for where you are going to assist. As a school, as an individual, the school administration—all of us will chip in and know how we are going to deal with this problem.”
PWC works to ensure girls are able to exercise their right to an education while also preserving pastoralist culture. One successful approach, the organization found, has been the formation of Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), created with help from Malala Fund. In PTA meetings, students, parents, teachers, elders, and government officials meet, discuss educational barriers, and come up with community-led solutions that preserve and honor their culture while advancing educational outcomes.
One recent PTA meeting highlights how these community-led solutions are often the most effective. At Lekule Girls Secondary School, the lack of fresh water forces girls to walk long distances to collect water for the school’s kitchen during the school day, and these long journeys not only disrupt class time but can leave girls vulnerable to sexual assault in isolated areas. Through facilitated discussion, PTA members landed on a solution: installing a borehole to pipe in fresh water to the school. Reliable access to water creates a better learning environment for the girls, but it also benefits the community at large, as local governments are then more likely to invest in health clinics and other community resources nearby.
With a solution in place, the PTA was then able to discuss ideas and map out a course of action. The women would raise money for the cost of the borehole, while the men would recruit workers to dig the hole and lay the pipe. Together, they would ask government officials to match their investment.
The benefits of PTA meetings within the pastoralist communities are undeniable. “The girls are talking and addressing issues in a confident way, and parents feel they are part of the resource team to solve challenges happening at school,” Grace says. One unexpected benefit: The larger cultural impact these PTA meetings have created. Thanks to the success of PTAs within pastoralist communities, the models are now being endorsed on a national level, and schools across Tanzania are starting to use them to solve problems in their own communities. When a community creates opportunities for girls to learn, everyone benefits.
Safe spaces in rural Pakistan help students and their parents connect, then drive change
A continent away in Pakistan, the country’s northernmost region of Gilgit-Baltistan seems like a land untouched by time. The region’s looming mountains, snow-capped peaks, lush valleys and crystalline lakes draw nature lovers and landscape photographers from around the world, but living among this kind of breathtaking scenery has its drawbacks. Schools in the region are few and far between, and the area’s harsh climate often makes roads inaccessible for travel. Poverty and gender-based discrimination are additional obstacles, making school even further out of reach, and girls are affected disproportionately. Going up against these barriers requires a persistent, quiet strength that’s found in the women who live there and reflected in Pakistan’s signature scent.
Saheli Circles are how local leaders in Gilgit-Baltistan are bridging the gap between girls and education. An Urdu term for “female friend,” Saheli Circles are after-school safe spaces where girls explore subjects like art and climate change, while also developing skills that help them manage emotions, set goals, and build positive relationships. Girls study in groups, visit the library, play sports, and tackle filmmaking and photography projects, all designed to develop self confidence and teach the girls how to advocate for issues that matter to them. But the work doesn’t stop there.
“What we’re trying to achieve here will only be impactful if it trickles down to the home environment and the school environment,” says Marvi Sumro, founder and program director of Innovate, Educate, and Inspire Pakistan (IEI), the local organization that developed the Saheli Circles model and partnered with Malala Fund in 2021 to make it a reality. Ever since, Saheli Circles have grown to involve teachers, elders, and parents to encourage relationship building that’s essential for young girls and adolescents. “Our spaces can give mothers and daughters an opportunity to interact a little differently—do an art activity, or have a cup of tea together, or some good conversation,” Marvi says.
The relationship building is what makes the biggest positive impact throughout the community. Recently, one Saheli Circle was able to bring together parents, teachers, and administrators to advocate for better education at their local school, and together they convinced the department of education to hire a science teacher. Another Saheli Circle organized a fund where members of the community can contribute monthly to pay for uniforms, books, and other school expenses for the girls in their village, eliminating those small, hidden costs that are often a barrier to education for many. A third Saheli Circle was able to produce a short film about how gender-based household chores can take away valuable study time from girls, leaving them at a disadvantage. “The girls put the film together and showed it to the mothers, and the response from the mothers was just beautiful,” Marvi says.
The education and relationship building that the girls receive in Saheli Circles connects them to larger opportunities and economic freedom that are not possible in their hometown. “For girls in Gilgit-Baltistan, education is extremely important because of the fact that we’re so far away from where the economy is, where the opportunity is. Education becomes this bridge for us, for our girls, to access all the opportunity and economy that exists in [larger cities].”
From rural Tanzania to remote Pakistan, local organizations prove every day that prioritizing girls’ education benefits everyone. Communities that lift up girls are able to secure resources like clean water and well-staffed schools, as well as build stronger relationships.
These outcomes are only possible because of the women and girls who work tirelessly in these regions to overcome barriers and drive progress. The Pura x Malala Fund Collection is a way to honor them, celebrate their achievements, and unite people the world over around a shared belief that education is freedom. Like scent, that belief can build, travel, and has the possibility to transform the world.
Experience the Pura x Malala Fund Collection here, and connect with the stories of real girls leading change across the globe.
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Luckily, Reddit made discovering these Internet gems much simpler. User @powerfulsites posed the following question: “What’s the most powerfully useful underground website that most people don’t know about?”
And the Internet responded in droves. (Guess the Internet enjoys talking about itself.) We grabbed 10 of the best, most wonderful recommendations, from powerful image editors to science-backed white noise generators. And once you know about them, you’ll wonder how you got along without them.
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Every classic you can think of, available in seconds, at no cost.
You know that annoying, nagging feeling when you’re reading through an article that references a new study (about Internet addiction, or candy consumption, or why people feel the need to buy those AMC popcorn buckets at ridiculous prices) and you wish you could see the actual data? Google Scholar fixes that. It’s a free search engine for academic papers, journal articles, and dissertations—over 160 million documents—that anyone can use, no university login required. Just type your question and find out what scientists actually found. It’s a superpower most people don’t know they have access to.
Did you know “disaster” literally means “bad star”? Or that “salary” comes from the Latin word for salt? Douglas Harper spent years building Etymology Online, a free dictionary of over 50,000 word origins, to provide information just like this to the masses. Here, you can trace the origins of modern English words back to their ancient roots. It’s the kind of site where you look up one word and resurface forty-five minutes later, cognizant of the terrifying origin of the word........