The last of the souvenir vending machines in the state and their distinctive warm plastic smell will disappear in early November.
By Richard Chin
The Minnesota Star Tribune
October 23, 2025 at 9:11PM
Get them while you can. A plastic lion, gorilla, polar bear and sea lion from Como Zoo’s Mold-A-Rama machine. (Como Park Zoo & Conservatory)
St. Paul’s Como Park Zoo announced some unhappy news Thursday morning that triggered a social media outpouring of nostalgia-tinged sadness.
It wasn’t the death of a beloved animal or the closing of a popular exhibit.
The bad news: The Mold-A-Rama machines are going to be removed.
The zoo’s four coin-operated automated plastic toy factories, the only public Mold-A-Rama machines in the state, have been a longtime fixture at the zoo, cranking out warm, freshly molded plastic gorillas, lions, sea lions and polar bears for generations of children.
But Mold-A-Rama Inc., the Chicago area company that owns and operates the machines, has decided to discontinue running the 60-year-old devices at the zoo.
Paul Jones, Mold-A-Rama Inc. president, said the Como Zoo Mold-A-Ramas pull in the fewest customers of the approximately 60 machines his company operates in places like the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan and the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
“It’s my smallest account, by far,” Jones said of the Como Zoo machines.
A warm mold of a Como Park gorilla is formed and then ejected from the Mold-A-Rama machine. (Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Jones said his plan is to move the vintage machines, which are no longer being manufactured, to an attraction that attracts more visitors. He would not say where they are going.
Richard Chin
Reporter
Richard Chin is a feature reporter with the Minnesota Star Tribune in Minneapolis. He has been a longtime Twin Cities-based journalist who has covered crime, courts, transportation, outdoor recreation and human interest stories.
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