King B Beef Jerky is a popular jerky company known for providing savory snacks to customers across North America. However, King B gained even more fame in the 1990s due to their unique baseball card promotional campaign. In an effort to promote their beef jerky products to a wider audience, King B decided to include a special baseball card in random packages of beef jerky beginning in 1992.
These unique King B Beef Jerky Baseball Cards quickly captured the interest of both casual baseball fans and serious card collectors. While they lacked any true monetary value, the novelty of finding a baseball card you could actually eat with your jerky made them enormously popular. Almost overnight, customers were eagerly rummaging through multiple bags of jerky trying to find one of the elusive cardboard pieces embedded within.
King B managed to ink licensing deals with both Major League Baseball and the players union, allowing them to use current player names, photos and stats on their cards. Each one measured 2 and 5/8 inches by 3 and 5/8 inches, slightly smaller than a standard sports card from the time. On the front would be an active player’s picture and franchise logo as well as their career stats. On the back was a brief biography of the player along with details about King B’s jerky products.
With each new season, King B released a totally new set of cards featuring that year’s biggest MLB stars like Kirby Puckett, Cal Ripken Jr., Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr. It’s estimated over a billion individual King B Baseball Cards were inserted into beef jerky packs between 1992-2001. Some of the more valuable and sought after include rookie cards for Derek Jeter, Pedro Martinez, Chipper Jones and Nomar Garciaparra.
While never intended to hold true collecting or resale value, the fun factor of the King B cards helped drive massive jerky sales. It also brought new customers into the trading card collecting hobby who enjoyed assembling full rainbow sets of the beefy cardboard. Hundreds of enthusiastic fans joined message boards and communities dedicated to swapping their doubles to complete their King B collections.
The uniqueness of the King B cards sparked huge novelty demand. Many enterprising fans tried to carefully remove the cards from their packaging to keep “mint” for potential future value. Most kids of the ‘90s preferred eating their jerky straight away to digging out the bonus cardboard prizes inside. Despite the lack of protective sleeves, hundreds of thousands of the promotional baseball gratification cards survived.
Some passionate collectors today still aim to get a full run of every King B Baseball Card ever inserted in jerky packs from 1992 through 2001. With a few hundred distinct issues released over a decade, this is no easy feat. The cards never had any true monetary value when initially distributed but some key cards can now fetch $20-50 in near mint condition depending on the player featured.
While nothing compared to valuable vintage or rookie trading cards, the fun kitschy pop culture memorabilia status of the King B cards continues to attract attention. Periodic eBay auctions see enthused buyers add choice issues to their personal collections. In today’s nostalgia-driven collectibles market, the memories and novelty aspect of these beefy baseball treats remain popular.
King B’s still-running promotional baseball card campaign deserves recognition as a highly unique piece of 1990s sports collectibles history. The creative beef jerky cross-promotional tactic sparked both millions in jerky sales as well as a legion of dedicated fans who enjoyed the chase of finding their next cardboard food prize two decades ago. While the cards were never meant as a true investment, their pop culture staying power proves this cheeky meat and baseball marriage was an undeniable success that still resonates with retro collectors today.
