Saturday, June 27, 2009

Pepsi buys into Calbee

According to this, on Wednesday, Pepsi bought 20% of Calbee (in return for Calbee taking over Frito-Lay in Japan). I don't expect that there will be any change in the baseball cards Calbee produces (unless they start giving them away with Frito's corn chips), but I thought it was of interest.

2 comments:

Jason Presley said...

Does Calbee only put their baseball cards into bags of potato chips? I've seen those "shrimp flavored chips" at WalMart from Calbee.

NPB Card Guy said...

I think they are almost always with potato chips. Glancing through Gary Engel's catalog, I see a couple of times when they were issued with something called "Tokyo Snack" which was apparently popcorn (1994 and 1996 maybe) and there's a 1995 issue called "Calbee Choco" that I'm guessing might have been with some sort of chocolate snack.

From what I've seen, the bags the cards are attached to are pretty obviously tied to NPB - they have either the logo of a single team or those of all 12 teams and are marked as "Baseball Chips". I've asked about them at local Oriental markets and just gotten blank stares.