Baseball Card Grocery Promotions

The 2026 MLB season opens this week and I do like to post about baseball during this time each year. Usually I post about baseball video games or a baseball toy, but I'm running out of material, so here is something about baseball cards, which aren't toys, but they were a fun part of my childhood. While I wasn't entirely sure what to title this post, it's about going to the grocery store as a kid and buying a product (or asking a parent to buy it) to get the free baseball card(s). Many foods ran promotions in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, especially Kellogg's and Post cereals, though other products had them too, like drinks, Ziploc bags, and even dog treats. I stopped collecting cards in the late '90s and although I have shopped for groceries many times since then, I don't recall when including trading cards with foods became rare, but my best guess is the early 2000s. 

   

Here are a couple Hostess ads from the '70s featuring baseball cards I don't own.

Of course, other sports and non-sports cards have appeared as freebies too. The last one I remember seeing is Jimmy Neutron cards being packaged with Ore-Ida fries back in 2002, the same year my most recent Post cereal card is from. I rarely even see anything included with cereal these days either. What happened to all the cool (and cheaply made) toys to find inside cereal boxes? It's too bad today's kids don't get to experience digging through a box of cereal to find that little plastic toy buried at the bottom of the bag. In any case, below you'll find photos of a sampling of the cards from my collection, though certainly not all of them. Most of the cards are of star players or a popular player on each team. The pictures are taken with a wide angle lens and the lighting is coming from a window to the right, so you'll notice shadows toward the left of most images and maybe some distortion on images taken at a slight angle.

Kellogg's

Kellogg's had some unique narrow cards in its early promotions and regular-sized lenticular cards later, and they all tend to curl on their own. In 1992 I took advantage of the mail-in offer to get a cardboard display stand.

Post

Kellogg's and Post likely ran the biggest promotions and across many years. You'll notice in some of these and many others, that the team logos have been airbrushed out because the companies did not always have the MLB license. Sometimes a company would allow consumers to order the full set, which I did for the 1993 Post set. It has Dave Fleming as the first card and mine is still sealed in the plastic wrap. The 2002 cards are from Topps and I still have a pack sealed.

Cracker Jack

This one makes perfect sense, as Cracker Jack is a common snack at baseball stadiums, or at least it used to be. Is it still today? I couldn't say since I haven't been to a MLB stadium in at least a decade. Like standard Crack Jack prizes, the cards are sealed within the red, white, and blue paper, so they are quite small. They measure about 1.75 inches by 1.25 inches, and sometimes the cards were yellowed by the food seeping into the paper wrapper. One year features miniature Topps 1991 40th anniversary cards and another the 1992 Donruss design. I noticed the Don Mattingly Donruss card does not match his full-sized card, so I checked Ken Griffey Jr.'s card and found that his image matches his Donruss All-Star card. I don't think Don Mattingly has a 1992 Donruss All-Star card; maybe the photo was an extra Donruss already had and this could be the only place it appears, though I can't be certain. Below is a photo comparing the size of a regular card to the Crack Jack cards, a couple still in wrappers, and some ad scans.

Drake's

Sometimes Drake's had nice cards and sometimes it put the cards on the bottom of its boxes. That meant consumers would have to cut the cards out of the box, so there are plenty of miscut Drake's cards with jagged edges out there.

Hostess

Although I don't have the Hostess cards from the ads posted at the top, I do have plenty from the 1993 Hostess Baseballs cupcakes.

Bazooka Bubble Gum

This is the only product that I still have the packaging for, and the 1991 Topps card design appears once again.

French's

The famous mustard company included three cards per purchase, and the cards feature both an AL and a NL all-star player on the same card for the same position.

Coca-Cola

I don't know where this one came from, perhaps it was in a case of soda. It's strip of four cards (three players and one checklist) that I didn't separate. One photo has a stapler in it that I used to weight it down because the cards didn't want to lay flat.

Pepsi-Cola

These cards are circles that can be popped out of a glove attached to a checklist. I already had photos of this one, so they don't have the same white background as the other photos.

Wonder Bread

I could only find a few of my Wonder Bread cards, but I know I have an uncut sheet that was a mail-in offer. Whenever I find it, if I do, I'll add a photo of it here.

Kraft

In 1993 Kraft Singles, the individually wrapped pieces of cheese, were packaged with pop-up cards. However, I didn't pop the cards up, which is done by pulling on a tab, as can be seen in the instructions.

Topps Cereal Series

I'm combing two cards here that look rather similar to one another, and I only have one of each. One card says "Topps Cereal Series" on it and the other "Ralston Purina Company," but it does have a Topps logo on it. As you can see, they otherwise have the same design on the front and the backs aren't too different either, with the only noticeable difference being the Topps and Ralston Puiina logos. Ralston Purina owned a lot of products, though the back of that card indicates the cards were found in Cookie-Crisp, Donkey Kong, and other cereals. My research did not come up with a lot, however, it would appear that these were used interchangeably, so the "Topps Cereal Series" cards were also included only with Ralston Purina cereals.

Ziploc

Ziploc bags came with cards of legends and I've got an ad for this one too. Although the ad is for the cards I own, if you zoom in on it, it looks like the kids are holding 1991 Topps cards.

Advil

Advil? Yes, Advil! Nolan Ryan was a spokesperson for the pain relief medication and while I don't believe cards were packaged with the product, consumers could order a boxed set of 27 cards spanning Ryan's career. I'm including an Advil ad I still have from the '90s, but it doesn't feature the card promotion. Also, I never opened the set, so I only have a photo of the box.

Everything Else!

While I gave Wonder Bread its own spot in the event that I find the uncut sheet, the rest are for the cards I only took one photo of. Below you'll see cards from Tombstone Pizza, Jimmy Dean the sausage company, Hamburger Helper, Homers Cookies, Milk Bone dog biscuits, and uniquely shaped cards from Tetley, the tea maker. Hamburger Helper cards had to be cut from the box, and there were eight boxes, each of a different flavor, to collect for the whole set. Homers Cookies weren't very kind to me as far as variety. Of the eight cards I pulled out of the cookie boxes, seven are Dizzy Dean!