Food Fight

Arriving in stores on February 24, 2021 after a slight delay from its original January target date, 2021 Series 1 Food Fight closed out a crowded season of Garbage Pail Kids releases and marked the final set steered by brand manager Jessica Kanzer before her departure. That checklist delivered one hundred new food-centric paintings paired into traditional a and b sticker designations numbered from 1a to 100b. Four core illustrators produced the entire base run, with Brent Engstrom painting sixty cards, Simko providing fifty-seven, David Gross completing forty-nine, and Joe McWilliams finishing thirty-four.

Topps distributed the release across collector hobby boxes, standard retail display boxes, fat packs, and a fresh variation on retail value packaging that traded traditional blasters for refrigerator tins. Offered at retail giants like Walmart and Target for roughly twenty dollars, the tins were issued with four distinct lid colors in green, red, orange, and blue, decorated with kitchen appliance art and packed with ten retail packs plus three Celebrity Chef insert cards.

Collectors working through the different formats found inserts distributed exclusively by pack type. Retail display boxes held the ten-card You Are What You Eat insert, fat packs yielded two Cereal Aisle cards per pack across a twenty-four-card run, and collector boxes offered ten different Wacky Packages patch cards numbered to 199 alongside mini refrigerator magnets packed two per bonus pack. Parallel borders brought familiar colors to the table, ranging from unnumbered Booger Green and Pepper Black borders to serial-numbered Spit in Your Food Blue cards capped at 99, Saucy Red cards limited to 75, and Fool's Gold parallels stamped to 50 copies. Boxes also marked Topps's first effort to tie retail packs to digital collecting by inserting Adam Appetite scratch-off cards that redeemed for digital packs on the WAX blockchain, accompanied by hand-drawn sketches from sixty artists that included brand-new egg-shaped die-cuts and classic trash-can shapes with reverse illustrations of heritage kids like Junkfood John, Fat Matt, and Slimy Sam.

The print run for Food Fight ended up breaking modern production records, with total volume estimated at roughly 1,790,000 packs, nearly triple that of the Late to School set from the prior year. Collation also produced headaches in hobby boxes, where the GPK Food Wacky Packages cards were meant to land once per box but only surfaced in fifteen to twenty percent of opened boxes. Artist autographs saw their numbering expanded to 80 copies each to compensate for the enormous production run.