Calbee Corrects Lucky Card Spelling on Chip Bags as Hiromi Ito Card Error Draws Attention

Calbee’s corrected chip bags have started appearing in stores, giving collectors a second variation to watch alongside the widely discussed Hiromi Ito height error. The packaging change fixes a misspelling in the Lucky Card promotion, but it hasn’t yet answered the question that may matter more to card collectors: do the newer bags also contain a corrected Ito card?

Two errors, one product line

The card error first brought extra attention to Calbee’s baseball cards in Japan. As described in a previous post, Hiromi Ito’s card gives his height as 176 metres. That striking figure prompted collectors to look closely at the card and helped set off a burst of interest in error copies.

The packaging mistake is a separate variation. On the back of the chip bag, a green box in the upper left explains the Lucky Card promotion. The name should appear in katakana as ラッキー. On the earlier bags, the final character is missing, leaving ラッキ.

Calbee corrected the spelling, and bags with ラッキー began reaching store shelves about a week before the writer’s account. The photograph shows both versions side by side, with the spelling mistake circled in blue and the corrected bag placed in the foreground. That direct comparison makes the packaging change easy to spot, even for someone who hasn’t followed the card story.

The card inside remains an open question

Whether the corrected packaging coincides with a corrected Ito card is still uncertain. The writer has managed to buy only a few of the newer bags, which have been selling quickly and often disappear from stores soon after restocking. None of those purchases has produced an Ito card, so there is no confirmed comparison between a card from the corrected bags and the known height error.

That gap matters because a change to the outside of a product doesn’t, by itself, establish what changed inside. The corrected printing on the bag confirms that Calbee fixed the promotion text. It doesn’t confirm whether card production changed at the same time, whether corrected Ito cards exist, or whether any such cards are included with the newer packaging.

Listings on Yahoo Auctions offer little resolution so far. Many examples of the error card remain listed at prices the writer considers excessive, and no corrected Ito version has appeared in the listings they checked. The absence of a listing is inconclusive: a corrected card may not exist, or a collector who has one may simply not have offered it for sale. It could also be an ordinary card that hasn’t drawn attention as a distinct variant.

Packaging can be part of the record

For collectors tracking a possible product change, the bag itself is useful evidence. The corrected katakana provides a visible marker that can distinguish one packaging version from the other. Keeping the bag unopened preserves that detail alongside the contents, while opening it might make the card easier to inspect but would alter the state of the package.

Careful documentation can help separate confirmed differences from assumptions. A collector comparing examples would want clear images of the promotion box, the full package and the Ito card, along with notes about which bag each card came from. The source account doesn’t establish a packaging code, print date or other marker that links a specific card version to either bag, so those details shouldn’t be inferred from the spelling alone.

For now, the corrected bag is a confirmed packaging variation, while a corrected Ito card remains unverified in the account. The writer plans to keep one error bag unopened, with its chips and card, as a memento. That’s a tidy way to preserve a small moment in the set’s collecting history while leaving the card question open for the next collector who finds a card inside a corrected bag.