Foods That Sold for More Than $10K at Auction

Food and beverages sell for exorbitant prices at auctions all the time. The reasons for the sky-high bids vary. Sometimes the item is a luxury good that the public will pay a lot for in a restaurant, it may be an item with an interesting tie to history, or it could be a one-of-a-kind product. Often, interesting food items are sold at charity auctions where the rich and famous are happy to plunk down tens of thousands for a good cause. No matter the reason for purchase, all of these expensive food items have interesting stories and backgrounds to discover.

Japanese tuna used primarily for sushi are sold at auction in fish markets. The most famous market, Tsukiji, closed recently to make way for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In January 2019, the first tuna at the new market, Toyosu, sold for $3.1 million. The winning bidder owns a sushi chain and has held the record for most expensive tuna purchase many years in the past.

Truffles are one of the world's ultimate luxury foods. They're small mushrooms that grow underground and must be sniffed out by dogs or pigs. The most expensive truffle to date was a very large 3.3 pound specimen that was dug up in Tuscany. A billionaire Macau casino owner named Stanley Ho purchased it for $330,000.

Anything that sailed on the Titanic is going to cost a lot of money. In 2015, a cracker from an emergency kit on board one of the lifeboats went was sold for $23,000. The cracker was taken as a souvenir by James Fenwick, a passenger on a boat that came to Titanic's aid the night it sank.

A giant chocolate egg sold in 2012 holds the record for most expensive chocolate egg sold at auction. The 3-foot, 110-pound egg was decorated with gold leaf and filled with chocolate and truffles. It was auctioned as part of an annual charity event. You have to wonder how long it took to eat it?

In 2016, a toddler fell into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo, and zoo officials killed Harambe the gorilla in order to protect the boy. The boy was fine, but the public was not happy with the death of the gorilla and it became an internet phenomenon. An enterprising eBay user decided to capitalize on the gorilla's infamy when they found a Cheeto shaped like Harambe. For some reason, the single corn puff sold for $99,900 on the auction website.

Before the Harambe Cheeto, there was the Virgin Mary toast. While a woman was eating a grilled cheese sandwich, she noticed that half of it seemed to have an image of Mary emblazoned on it. She kept it in a plastic box, and 10 years later in 2004, auctioned it on eBay, where it sold for $28,000. People really will buy anything.

A rare bottle of whisky sold for $1.5 million at the end of 2018. The Scotch is The Macallan 1926 and was aged in a sherry barrel. But it isn't just the liquor that's rare: The bottle was the only one hand-painted by Irish artist Michael Dillon. That leads to a one-two punch of scarcity.

Related:20 Best Whiskeys Under $50

Fruit is big business in Japan. All kinds of fruits are grown with exacting techniques in order to create what is seen as a perfect specimen, which are then purchased for exorbitant amounts and often given as gifts. In 2016, a bunch of about 30 grapes with a sugar content of at least 18 percent, was sold for $10,900. That's over $360 per grape.

Similarly, two melons sold in Japan for over $29,000 in the first auction of the 2018 season. They were purchased by the president of a produce-packing company and were displayed before being cut up and shared with customers and clients as gifts.

The oldest rum ever to be sold at auction commanded a high price: $177,000 for 16 bottles. Found under thick mold and cobwebs in the cellar of Harewood House in Leeds, England, the rum dates from the 1780s and was distilled in Barbados.

A charity auction at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 brought about the purchase of a $139,000 bottle of vodka and caviar. The vodka, a bottle of RussoBaltique, is filtered through diamonds and contains a diamond filter in the bottle. The caviar was produced by the same Latvian luxury armored vehicle company as the vodka.

The most expensive fortune cookie ever sold at auction fetched a $17,473 price tag. It was auctioned in London at the 2006 Chinese New Year Gala Dinner to benefit the charity Kids. Here's hoping it contained a really good fortune.

Sotheby's predicted a bottle of wine would sell for around $32,000, but that was way off. Instead, the 1945 Romanee-Conti Burgundy went for $588,000 in 2018. Only 600 bottles were produced by the winemaker in 1945, and the grape vines were dug up and moved at the end of the season.

Whisky lovers can't seem to get their hands on enough rare bottles, since they often fetch the highest prices of any alcohol at auction. A bottle from Japan's oldest whisky distillery, Yamazaki, sold for $343,000 in 2018. The whisky inside was 50 years old and purchased by an anonymous bidder.

Royal merchandise is sold everywhere in the U.K., but one item that sold in 1999 really takes the cake. When King Edward III decided to abdicate in 1936 in order to marry Wallis Simpson, a love story for the ages played out. A piece of their wedding cake was saved in a small box and sold for $29,900 in an auction of their estate items.

Back before McDonald's started distributing it more widely, there was a mad rush for their Szechuan dipping sauce. Originally created to promote the movie "Mulan" in 1998, it gained notoriety among fans of the adult cartoon Rick and Morty, who included it in a gag. Thanks to the combination of popularity and scarcity, a bottle of the sauce sold on eBay for $15,350 in 2017.

An annual Ham Breakfast hosted by the Kentucky Farm Bureau at the Kentucky State Fair always includes a charity auction. In 2018, the 18.77-pound grand champion ham brought in an astounding $2.8 million thanks to two donors who combined their bids. The proceeds went to the University of Kentucky.

During World War I, Tsar Nicholas II commissioned a Swedish ship to deliver bottles of wine and champagne. But the ship was sunk off the coast of Finland and not salvaged until 1998. The cold sea kept a bottle of 1907 Charles Heidsieck champagne preserved. That "shipwrecked champagne" brought in $275,000 at an auction in Moscow.

At an auction for the Pink Caravan, a breast-cancer charity, a burger sold for $10,000. The 2017 event was a culinary fundraiser where chefs prepared extravagant dishes that were then auctioned off in Dubai. The burger, created by chef Shaikh Al Thani, was purchased by the owner of a magazine. Two years earlier, another of his burgers sold for $7,000.

Each season, a symbolic tray of mangoes is sold at auction at the Brisbane Markets in Australia. In 2012, the mangoes sold for $54,000 ($76,000 AUD) to Sam Coco, the owner of Coco's Fresh Produce Market, who was crowned as Queensland's Mango King. The money went to two local children's charities.

The Botanical Gardens of Heligan in England produced pineapples in 2012 in a Victorian-style greenhouse that used tons of fresh manure to fertilize and produce heat. According to the gardens, the pineapples were sweet and not stringy. They were auctioned off for about $13,000 each.

A taco and a glass of tequila were sold at a charity auction in Los Cabos, Mexico, in 2017 for $27,960. The decadent taco was made with langoustine, Kobe beef, caviar and black-truffle brie cheese wrapped in a gold flake-speckled tortilla. The tequila came from a Le Lay bottle encrusted with diamonds and platinum that is worth $3.5 million itself. The winning bid went to Los Cabos Children's Foundation.

It's no surprise that the world's most expensive crab was sold at an auction in seafood-loving Japan. The snow crab weighed about 2.8 pounds and was sold in Tottori for $17,648 in fall of 2018.

In 2011, a bottle of 1858 Cuvee Leonie cognac was sold at auction for $156,760. It's rumored that President Eisenhower plotted the D-Day invasions while sipping from a different bottle of this 1858 Croizet. Unlike most of the items in this list, you can actually buy this bottle right now for the same price it was auctioned at.

It's no regular bottle of water that someone paid $60,000 for in 2010. The 750ml of water was sourced from Fiji and France, then put in a 24-karat gold decorated bottle designed in the style of late Italian artist Amedeo Clemente Modigliani. The auction benefited the Plan3t Foundation and the fight against climate change.

While it's not actually food, the Lincoln fry deserves a spot on this list. Created by McDonald's for a viral marketing campaign in 2005, the fry is molded plastic meant to look like a french fry with the profile of Abe Lincoln. After the marketing campaign had run its course, including a Super Bowl commercial and a blog meant to look like the folks who "discovered" the fry had created it, it was auctioned on Yahoo! for $75,100, all of which went to the Ronald McDonald House. Amusingly, the company that purchased the Lincoln fry, CasinoPalace.com, also bought the Virgin Mary toast.