A 33-year-old California woman has done it again, flipping 60-year-old food for a big profit.
The woman, who requested anonymity to maintain her privacy, began looking at estate sales for sealed food during the COVID-19 pandemic, and experienced success when she flipped a sealed box of Playboy chocolates from the 1960s.
She paid just $32 for the chocolates but flipped them for $600.
On Sunday, a sealed tray of 10 Post cereals from 1961, with Mickey Mantle on one of the boxes, sold for $21,600 at REA.
The woman told cllct she bought the lot of six sealed cereal packages from a liquidation company for $75 total. When she picked them up in Atherton, California, she was told the boxes were stored with other food in a nuclear bunker that had been built during the era.
Having studied in fine arts, she seemed to have gravitated to things such as old designs on food packaging from the '50s and '60s.
Then came the research.
“I found out that cereal was valuable,” she told cllct.
You could say that again.
She said she sold five of the boxes for a combined $3,000, and the final box was the motherlode with a return of 32,700%.
When observing the Post box she realized there were baseball cards on the boxes.
And not just any cards. It was the 1961 Post mini-boxes, and there in the corner was none other than Mickey Mantle.
In 1961, Post made the greatest run of cards a food company has ever had. It hired Mantle for a TV commercial and promised 200 different stars on the set that came on the back of the boxes.
PSA has graded more than 400,000 cards from the 1961 Topps set, but fewer than 15,000 cards from the 1961 Post set.
Of the 449 Mantle Post cards PSA has graded, there is one 9 and no 10s. PSA has also graded 20 panels. None of them have Mantle in it.
Upon doing her research, the woman found REA, which has sold many Post cards, including Mantle, and consigned them to the auction.
REA had never sold an unopened package from 1961. In fact, the last time unopened Post-10 mini boxes sold on eBay was in 2015 for $2,550.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.