Wyoming Collectors Can’t Believe Someone Paid $88,000 For A Cheeto

The lucky snacker who pulled a once-in-a-lifetime find from a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos cashed in when a Pokémon-shaped Cheeto fetched nearly $88,000 at auction this week.

The small chunk of extruded cornmeal covered in bright red Cheetos dust resembles one of the most popular and collectible Pokémon cards, Charizard, a fire-breathing dragon.

Even people in the collectibles industry are shaking their heads over the Charizard Cheeto, which has been dubbed “Cheetozard.”

Megan Giatroudakis, owner of Collector’s Hub in downtown Cheyenne, is one of them. She said when she heard about the $88,000 collectible Cheeto, she was “stunned.”

“It looks kind of cool, but I thought, ‘This is insane,’” she told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday. “I mean, it’s a Cheeto. But, I guess people will buy anything nowadays.”

What doesn’t surprise Giatroudakis is that anything that slightly resembles a Pokémon will sell.

“Pokémon is just insane anymore, and I can’t keep it in stock,” she said, adding that Cheetozard reminds her of another run on a food collectible.

“A couple of years ago they were doing Oreos that had Pokémon on them, and there was one of the rare ones that were selling on eBay,” she said. “Right now, I guess it’s worth what anybody would pay for it."

For whoever sold Cheetozard, it’s not a bad return on investment, considering a standard 8.5-ounce bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos costs $3.33 at the Cheyenne Walmart. With about 21 pieces per serving and about nine servings per bag, someone has 189 chances of finding another Holy Grail-type Cheeto.

For those into math, that’s about 1.7 cents per Cheeto, meaning the Cheeto that sold Sunday for $87,840 at the Goldin auction house fetched more than 5.1 million times what the crunchy bite originally sells for.

Those kind of numbers make Giatroudakis' quip about sifting through the bags of Cheetos she sells in her store less of a joke.

Stuff That Looks Like Stuff

An $88,000 Charizard Cheeto is certainly rare, but not unprecedented.

In 2017, a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto that resembled the famous Cincinnati zoo gorilla Hombre was put up for sale on the online auction house eBay. The bids got up to nearly $100,000 before eBay took the auction down.

And in 2008, a woman from Missouri made national headlines with “Chesus,” a Cheeto that she said looked like Jesus on the cross.

“I think I found Jesus on a Cheeto,” Kelly Ramey told CBS News at the time. “That looks like Jesus on the cross.”

Jesus and the Virgin Mary seem to show up more than others in food items. Before Chesus was discovered, a woman in 2004 sold a grilled-cheese sandwich that allegedly had the image of the Virgin Mary fried into it. That fetched $28,000.

Another Mary sighting came in 2012 when a piece of toast surfaced with an outline of what some say was either the pope or the Virgin Mary.

And let’s not forget the incident in 2010 when a man named Toby Elles burned some bacon, but when he looked into the pan saw more than some overcooked pork. An outline of Jesus was there, a complete face, including a beard and long hair.

“I’m going to keep it for the rest of my life,” he told the British news outlet The Telegraph at the time.

More Pokémon?

Sunday’s sensational auction may up sales of Cheetos as people rip open the bags to see if they can find Elvis, Abraham Lincoln or another Charizard.

If that seems a little extreme, consider that Pokémon collectibles isn’t big business, it’s huge. Some extremely rare and sought-after cards fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And Charizard is highly prized.

In September, a 1999 Pokémon First Edition base set Charizard holographic card in pristine condition sold for $180,000, and another like it sold in 2022 for $420,000.

The record for a Pokémon card was set in March 2022, when YouTuber Logan Paul bought a one-of-a-kind pristine No. 10-rated Illustrator Pikachu card for more than $5.2 million.

William Shannon of Cheyenne was perusing some of the "Magic: The Gathering" cards at Collector’s Hub on Thursday. He hadn’t heard about the huge money the Cheeto fetched Sunday and shook his head in disbelief.

“That's just nuts," he said. "It’s just going to mold or something, right? Bro, that’s a car.”

Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.