Getting Carded

I have three brothers and a sister. Growing up I don't remember which ones of us collected Mallo Cup cards, but I know at least two of my brothers and I did. Mallo Cup cards were these cardboard cards that came in packages of Boyer Mallo Cups and Boyer Peanut Butter Cups. The cards were not the main attraction, but they added to the experience.

First off, even if there were no cards we would have bought Boyer candy; it was just amazing. Mallo Cups were like large Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, only instead of peanut butter, they had marshmallow cream inside. The Boyer Peanut Butter Cups were for a long time the only kind of peanut butter cup you could buy and years later when Reese's showed up on the market, they were a pale comparison to the wonder that was a Boyer Peanut Butter Cup. One Boyer cup was bigger than two Reese's cups.

But the extra added attraction to the Boyer candy were the Mallo Cup cards. Plain white card stock imprinted in red or black ink they were a form a money. Each had a denomination printed on them, from one penny to fifty cents (though I don't think I ever saw a fifty cent card); most were for a penny. There was one card in each Mallo Cup or Peanut Butter Cup package. The candy was also sold in two-piece packages which contained two cards printed on a single piece of cardboard.

The deal was that if you could collect five dollars worth of cards you could send them into Boyer and they would send you a case of Mallo Cups. OK, it was a small case of ten cups, but it was free candy! And heck, the candy was already too good to pass up!

One of my brothers actually collected enough cards and got the free candy. The rest of us just had stacks of worthless cards in our "junk drawers" for years.

Reese's eventually pushed Boyer out of the market, making it impossible to find their products, but Boyer has actually been around all these years. I have not seen their products in a store for decades, but you can now order from their website.