When it comes to vintage Star Wars cards, most of us default to images of the colorful starfield bordered Topps set which spanned 5 series from 1977 to 1978. But that’s not the only option for collectors to consider. Enter one of my favorites, the 1977 Wonder Bread set.

You know I love a good oddball food issue set. I’ve written about WWF Quaker Dipps, Big League Chew baseball cards, and Carnation Hot Chocolate Wrestling Cards, but I think this is the first time I’ve written about a Non-Sports food issue!

The Star Wars Wonder Bread set contains 16 cards. One card was included with each specially marked loaf of Wonder Bread. In addition to the cards, the actual bread bags have also become quite collectible. I was not old enough to influence bread purchases as a newborn in 1977, but if I was a few years older, I would have been begging my mom to buy multiple loaves a week to chase these cards!

The cards have a simple design. The black bordered cards feature a large image of a character or a ship. A vertical Star Wars logo goes up the right side of the card, and both the Character and Actors name is found in a yellow box at the bottom of the card. The black borders look sharp, but create condition issues which have made high grade cards very pricy. At the time of this writing, a recent PSA 10 Darth Vader card from the set sold for $3,750. Here is a link to see the most recent prices of PSA 10 cards.

Ungraded is the approach I took when building my set. Depending on condition, raw cards can range from $1 to about $40 for the most popular cards. As you can see below, I first picked up any copy of each card that I could find, and that will lead me to an opportunity to upgrade several of the low grade copies which are currently part of my collection. As you can see, not only were the black borders subject to wear, but the character name also was prone to fading.

In addition to the “one per loaf” path to collecting, Wonder Bread also provided an opportunity to get all 16 cards via a mail in offer.

I picked up the majority of my set via the Chicago Non-Sports show and COMC.com, but there are plenty of them on eBay and there are also a handful on Sportlots.

Check out my set in the video below!