THE PANTRY PALS

Today, Texas-based H-E-B has a fairly robust collection of brand name products, including school supplies, cookware, and even some clothing items. However, a little known fact is their line of Beanie Baby-like stuffed animals in the late 1990s, named the Pantry Pals. They were sold at (and had the same logo of) H-E-B Pantry Foods, their limited-assortment discount grocery store found in new markets (since phased out), though they might have been sold at "full" H-E-B stores as well.

I did have "Roarie the Lion" personally but as of this writing, Roarie is somewhere deep in storage and unavailable for comment.

As no listing of the Pantry Pals are on the Internet, I stumbled across an eBay listing (archived PicClick link here) that was selling a number of new and unsold Pantry Pals. I wasn't going to spend $32 plus shipping for 75 of them, but I was going to talk about them here as a permanent record long after the listing vanished.

According to what the seller has, there was Snuggles (the) Bunny, Elsie (the) Cow, Suey (the) Pig, Pogo (the) Panda, Wags the Dog, Bucky the Horse, Rambler the Ram, Chip the Monkey, Jumbo the Elephant, Monte Moose, Tiggy the Tiger, Roarie the Lion, Horace the Hippo, and Bobo the Bear. I'm not sure if Elsie the Cow was specifically licensed from Borden Dairy (which at the time was owned by Southern Foods Group, having spun off from Borden, Inc. in 1997.