Toys / The Grossery Gang

Your Shopkins gone rotten.

The Grossery Gang is a toyline from Moose Toys (creators of The Trash Pack and Shopkins) and are a combo of both in one. Taking the world of The Trash Pack, yet the style of Shopkins, The Grossery Gang is made up of collectable blind bag foods and other grocery products that have gone so rotten, they’ve come to life. The series also shares a universe with the previous two.

An Animated Adaptation exists for the series in the form of webtoons.

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The Grossery Gang provides examples of:

A-M

• Added Alliterative Appeal: A small portion of the Grosseries have alliterative names, like Horrid Hamburger and Putrid Pizza.
• Advertising by Association: The packages have labels on the top of their pegs with "From the makers of The Trash Pack!" on them. Before their official release, both The Trash Pack and Shopkins YouTube channels aired crossover promotions for The Grossery Gang.
• Ambiguous Gender: There are no pronouns listed in the standard website bios, leaving the gender up in the air for any character that is not in the webtoons or the collector's guide.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Some of the tribes are based on household objects instead of food, such as the Barf-Room Supplies (made up of bathroom equipment), the Glowin' Gadgets (made up of electronic devices), the Cruddy Lost 'N' Found (various lost items like keys and wallets), the Trash Alley (made up of organic garbage), the Cruddy Sport (various sports equipment), the Junk Yard (non-organic garbage), the Clean Team (cleaning products), the Gunky Gas Station (various car materials), the Foot Soldiers (various footwear), the Hair Force (hair care items), the Repellants (bug deterrent items), Stationery Officers (stationery equipment), Medics (medical equipment), and Scrappy Camo (broken toys).
• Anthropomorphic Food: The majority of the characters, being food that came to life via age.
• Bad Future: The future that the Rotbots come from is a hygienic wasteland that can't sustain them, so they have come to the present to suck up its grossness for themselves.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Unlike the standard white sclera with black pupils that the standard Grosseries have, the evil teams (the Clean Team, the Bug Force, the Rotbots, and the Computer Viruses) have black sclera with red pupils.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Some of the Awful Sauces, such as Chunky Chili Sauce and Tasteless Tobasco Sauce, are burning under their own contents.
• Brain Freeze: Ice Scream's collector card has him suffering one...as in, his brain is literally encased in a block of ice.
• Bug War: Series 4, the "Bug Strike", has the Grosseries up against an army of insects invading Cheap Town.
• Canon Welding: The series shares a universe with The Trash Pack and Shopkins, the former via packaging, and both via commercial connections.
• Cartoon Cheese: Stinky Cheese is a wedge of one. Series 2 would later avert this with the more realistic Blue Spew Cheese and Pongy Parmesan.
• Collectible Card Game: The Grossery Gang Collector Cards played as a happy medium between the cards of the Shopkins and The Trash Pack. They were meant as collectibles like Shopkins, but had Top Trumps stats like The Trash Pack. Some cards had special finishes, like flocked fuzzy ones, sticker cards, and holographic ones. Like The Trash Pack, it portrayed the Grosseries in brand new scenarios, this time with a new art style compared to the static art.
• Content Warnings: The website bios jokingly contain “may contain traces” for the characters of disgusting products that they have in them. Also, the toys themselves have warnings on how the “products contain no food”.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • Series 3 had the Clean Team, a team of cleaning products wishing to eradicate all filth in Cheap Town.
  • Series 4, meanwhile, had the Bug Strike, a team of equally-filthy insects who appreciated the filth the Grosseries had created, but wanted the filth for themselves, claiming it as their own turf.
  • Series 5 had the Rotbots a team of former-Grosseries from the future who have come to the past to replenish their lost grossness.
• Creepy Cleanliness: The Clean Team is a villainous team of cleaning products that came to live. Their goal is to eradicate the dirt of Cheap Town, and are designed as perfectly polished, with no slime or grime on them.
• Cyborg: The Rotbots are Grosseries with mechanical enhancements. To represent this in the toys, they are the standard squishy rubber with hard plastic chunks.
• Disgusting Public Toilet: The bathroom of the Yucky Mart is just as rancid as the store itself, with marker graffiti, random stains on the walls, and a hairy and smelly toilet.
• Edible Theme Naming: The food-based Grosseries are named after their food and a disgusting adjective.
• Eye Scream: Le Crusty Croissant's trading card has an Eiffel Tower model jammed through one of his eyes, with the caption of "Eye-ful Tower!".
• False Teeth Tomfoolery: Filthy False Teeth is hinted to be the result of this, a lost pair of dentures from the Cruddy Lost 'N' Found team.
• Four-Fingered Hands: All the humans in the supplemental material, as well as the Grosseries when given limbs, have four fingers. Despite this, Sewer Glove is designed as a five-fingered cleaning glove.
• French Cuisine Is Haughty: As a reference to this, Le Crusty Croissant is given a beret and mustache…but is still as moldy and grimy as everyone else.
• Ghost Town: Cheap Town. After a mega motorway was built towards Sales City, Cheap Town, the location the series takes place in, was abandoned. This left multiple businesses empty. Empty businesses never cleared out of rotting food, combined with a strange toxic leak, caused the Grosseries to take form.
• Gross-Out Show: Similar to The Trash Pack, its predecessor.
• Guest Fighter: In a non-video game example, Blow Fly and Trash-a-Pillar are figures in Series 3, helping the Grosseries go against the Clean Team.
• Hairy Girl: Spotty Zit Cream, being given arms in her trading card that her figure lacks, has thick armpit hair, which is made noticeable as she raises her arms to pop a zit.
• Harmless Freezing: Four exclusive Series 1 Grosseries are still-alive insects trapped in ice cubes.
• iPhony: Trashed Tablet is a broken iPad, to the point his catalog art's coding calls him one.
• It Came from the Fridge: The Grosseries are explicitly food that has festered so badly that they’ve come to life.
• Klatchian Coffee: Buzzed Energy Drink is on a giant caffeine rush from his own contents, to the point his eyes are spiraling and his teeth are clenched.
• Lethal Eatery: The Yucky Mart, which doubles as both a convenience store and an eatery. The restaurant portions are just as filthy as the rest of the store, and the food served is vomit-inducing.
• Living Toys: The Scrappy Camo team, made up of various broken toys, like boomerangs and teddy bears.
• Messy Maggots: Following in the footsteps of its successor, The Trash Pack, uses maggots as decoration on the characters to signify their rot. Series 4 of the franchise later introduced Maj. Maggots, an evil living maggot that used a rotten chicken drumstick as his weapon.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Some Grosseries are given names that are the same as previous characters from The Trash Pack, the predecessor to the franchise. Some of the names include Putrid Pizza and Shoccoli.
  • The Series 1 large pack and Series 2 surprise pack both say "Best Before 1985", in reference to the founding year of Moose Toys.
  • Blow Fly and Trash-a-Pillar themselves reappear as figures in Series 3. Blow Fly, being an exclusive action figure, gets an extended bio that makes use of his original Trash Pack bio, while giving his nickname as "Buzz", the name he was called in the failed Mondo TV cartoon.

N-Z

• One-Steve Limit:
  • Averted, there are two characters named Horrid Hot Dog, one from Series 1 (a full hot dog) and the other from Series 2 (just a sausage).
  • Series 3 would also later avert this with two Clean Team members named "Washout", with the only difference being that one of them has a space between the two words, and their object type, with Washout being a bucket, and Wash Out being a washing machine.
• Onion Tears:
  • Onion Scum is a self-crying onion, while Smelly Onion is a crying onion slice.
  • Franko's onion mace utilizes both pain from spikes and tears from being an onion slice to help neutralize his enemies.
• Palette Swap: Nearly every character has their figure in a minimum of two colors to collect, with some having extra ones in exclusive packages.
• Pepper Sneeze:
  • Snot N Pepper are a pair of salt and pepper containers, one with their face contorted into a sneeze, the other one exploding with snot already from one.
  • Grot Pepper Sauce, in a variation, is a bottle of pepper sauce that has already exploded with snot as well from a sneeze.
• Phlegmings: Many of the food Grosseries have them making up their mouths, from their own rotting contents.
• The Psycho Rangers: The Clean Team. Themed around cleanliness over grossness, spotless and shiny instead of slime covered and moldy, they are the evil antithesis to the Grossery Gang, with the goal of cleaning up Cheap Town.
• Secondary Color Nemesis: The color schemes of the Bug Strike members are various shades of purple, orange, and green, with teal thrown in for a few, and black details to top it off.
• Self-Deprecation: Arak Attack is portrayed as a boisterous Aussie villain that loads so much slang into his dialogue that he can be near incomprehensible at times. Moose Toys themselves are an Australian company.
• Self-Parody: The toyline is the style of Shopkins corrupted into The Trash Pack style.
• Series Continuity Error: The Collector's Guide erroneously refers to Spotty Zit Cream and Cruddy Cat Food with male pronouns, despite the fact they were confirmed female in the trading cards and the webseries, respectively.
• Shared Universe: With The Trash Pack and Shopkins.
• Shout-Out:
  • Stunk Skunk wears a pine tree air freshener as a necklace, similar to Petunia in Happy Tree Friends.
  • Grotty Graffiti wears a clock necklace similar to that of Flavor Flav, adding to his 80s hip-hop design.
• Slime, Snails, and Mutant Tails: Most of the Grosseries are dripping slime of various sorts.
• Slobs Versus Snobs: The sloppy, ragtag, and heroic Grosseries vs. the polished, conformist, and evil Clean Team.
• Smelly Skunk: Stunk Skunk, who wears a pine tree air freshener around his neck to escape his own smell.
• The Smurfette Principle: The toyline has very few girls in the cast, if any at all. Of note are Sticky Soda, being the only girl in the "main" cast, along with Cruddy Cat Food, being the only girl in the Trashed Cans.
• Sphere Eyes: The Grosseries are given this style of eyes, in the disconnected version. Like The Trash Pack, they have simple dots for their eyes, which bugs them out. Preliminary designs gave them irises, however. Series 2 would later give some characters the connected variation, though they are separated for the ones appearing in the webseries.
• Stock "Yuck!": Many of the Grosseries are these foods, such as broccoli, raisins, and cauliflower.
• Sunglasses at Night: Leaky Sunscreen and Stinky Fink Iced Tea always wear a pair.
• Tagline: The franchise alternates between "Your shoppin's gone rotten!" and "Collect the lot before they rot!".
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Played around with. Gooey Smooch has eyelashes, lipstick, and wears a ribbon. Sticky Soda and Sour Pineapple on the other hand just have eyelashes…but only in the webtoons and trading cards, respectively, they both have the standard Grossery eyes in the toyline. Meanwhile, Spotty Zit Cream doesn't have any notifiers, just her tagline on her collector card.
• Time Travel Episode: The "Time Wars" series has the Grosseries travelling through various eras of history to gather allies against the evil Rotbots from the future.
• The Tooth Hurts: Rotting Toothpaste's collector card has him showing off his rotten teeth, while gleefully spitting out another one.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot:
  • Pukey Pancake Mix is freely vomiting out his contents, and vomit splatters (with the stereotypical peas, corn, and carrots) often are used as decoration on packages.
  • Some of the trading cards have characters puking as well, such as Pukey Cookie and Barf Biscuit, who were only hinted for this with their names at first.
• Wallet Moths: Worthless Wallet has a few flying out of his zipper mouth.
• Way Past the Expiration Date: All of the Grosseries are so past their expiration date that they are alive.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Cheap Town has various things that contradict its location, such as Australian-style wall outlets and snow during Christmas.
• William Telling: The character William Smell actually is the apple that was performed in one of these tricks. Now all he can do is stare in horror at the arrow lodged through his bitten head.
• Worm in an Apple: Awful Apple is a full apple rotten minus one bite, with a worm sticking out of him. In the trading cards, it is depicted as a much longer and thinner worm.
• Writing Around Trademarks: Tasteless Tobasco Sauce's name is one letter off of real Tabasco Sauce, a trademarked product. He also shares a modified version of the diamond logo, only in different colors and the edges chopped off to make a hexagon.
• You Need a Breath Mint: Stinky Mint is an already bad-breathed breath mint, defeating his own purpose.

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