All great ideas, thanks! I tried many of them and settled on a hybrid. I had to make a few somewhat ugly tweaks because some of the key names were repeated with different values (intended to be different keys with the same name) funky.. but I just tacked on a increment number to the key name. Hey whatever works right?
Here is the code

my $data="fruit=pear meat=chicken legs fruit=orange slices cheese=mont
+erey jack meal=lunch meat=ribs bread= ";
my %foo;
while ($data =~ m/(\S+)=(\S*($|([^=]+\s+)*))/g) {
    my ($tmpkey,$tmpval);
    my $count=1;
    $tmpkey=$1;
    $tmpval=$2;
    
    
  while (defined $foo{$tmpkey}){
      $count++;
      $tmpkey=~s/\_\d+$//;
        $tmpkey.="_$count";
    }
     $foo{$tmpkey}=$tmpval;
    

}


for (sort (keys %foo)){
     if ($_!~/_\d+/){
     my $rm=$_;
     $_.="_1";
     $foo{$_}=$foo{$rm};
     delete $foo{$rm};
    }
    chomp ($_,$foo{$_});
    print "$_->$foo{$_}\n";
    }
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