A case of Pokémon pareidolia has proven rather profitable for one seller.
On March 2, a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto shaped like the Pokémon Charizard sold at auction for $87,840. Nicknamed “Cheetozard,” the viral fire-breathing-creature-shaped snack was sold through Goldin, an online auction house specializing in trading cards, collectibles and other memorabilia.
Cheetozard is a three-inch long Flamin’ Hot snack mounted to a custom Pokémon card encapsulated in a clear card storage box.
Bidding for the item started at $250 on Feb. 10 at 8:10 PM, and 60 bids later, the winning bid of $72,000 was made on March 2 at 1:42 AM, according to Goldin. The extra $15,840 on the final price is the auction house’s 22% “buyer’s premium” fee.
Goldin declined to share who purchased the pricy Cheeto but says that people from all over the world visited its website to watch the auction, which ran for nearly a month.
“Goldin specializes in rare and one-of-a-kind collectibles, and the Cheetozard is exactly this,” Dave Amerman, Goldin’s head of consignment, tells TODAY.com. “Part of what makes this item so fun and unique is that it bridges two fandoms — Pokémon and Cheetos.”
On March, 2, in a Instagram post in collaboration with eBay, Goldin posted about the sale.
As expected, this has led to plenty of online commentary.
“This sums up 2025,” commented one person.
“If I was on death row. I’d want this to be my final meal,” said another.
“Good thing I didn’t pull it because I would have ate it in seconds ????,” another joked.
Many commenters brought up “Comedian,” Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s 2019 artwork that consists of a single banana duct-taped to a wall which sold at Sotheby for $6.24 million in 2024.
“I got an onion shaped like bulbasaurs back taking offers,” wrote someone else. (Bulbasaur is shaped like an onion — this is a solid joke.)
“This has gotta be one of the most unserious things I’ve ever seen go up for auction in the Pokémon world, this is hilarious,” said YouTuber Dani Sanchez (Super Duper Dani), who was able to see the uniquely shaped snack up close at Goldin’s booth at Collect-A-Con in Los Angeles earlier this month.
Representatives for Cheetos did not immediately respond to TODAY.com’s request for comment, but the company’s Instagram account simply posted, “????” in response to the sale.
Goldin says the Cheetozard was initially discovered and preserved sometime between 2018 and 2022 by 1st & Goal Collectibles. In April 2024, the collectibles store wrote on Instagram that the shapely snack sat in a safe “for about five years” before someone rediscovered it.
The Cheeto went viral in the time since its uncovering, appearing in posts and memes on various social media platforms. One fan even dedicated a now-defunct cryptocurrency to its existence: the Cheetozard meme coin.
It must also be said that, at this point, uniquely-shaped Cheetos are a market unto themselves. Snacks shaped like Arnold Schwarzennegger, Godzilla and the Nike swoosh are all currently being auctioned on eBay for thousands of dollars.
While those have yet to be sold, the $87,000 Cheetozard actually might be a steal: In 2017, a Cheeto apparently shaped like Harambe the Gorilla sold on eBay for $99,900.
This article originally appeared on TODAY.com. Read more from TODAY:
