These Two States' Favorite Halloween Candy Is Different From The Rest Of America

With Halloween just weeks away, people will be stocking up on candy to hand out to all the little ghouls and goblins who go trick-or-treating in their neighborhoods. Not to mention all the trunk-or-treat events held at churches and schools that will be dispensing candy to large groups of children, plus the offices and workplaces that will leave out bowls of candy for their employees.

Halloween sweets are big business in America, with consumers projected to spend an estimated $3.1 billion on candy in 2022, according to Investopedia. Or in terms of mass, we buy approximately 600 million pounds of candy a year during Halloween (per Huffington Post). Total Halloween expenditures this year are expected to soar to a record level of $10.6 billion (per the National Retail Federation).

Costumes and decorations comprise part of these costs and contribute to the festive atmosphere surrounding Halloween, but in the end, five out of five kids agree it's really all about the candy. So, which candies reign supreme in the U.S.? Most of the country seems to be buying the same two candies above all others, except for two outlying states which have a preferred Halloween candy that is different from the rest of America.

The online grocery delivery service Instacart examined the candy-buying landscape in this great nation of indulgence, calculating the highest-selling products based on the weight of each candy sold in every state. The data is based on consumer spending habits in October 2021.

It found that most of the East and Midwest sided squarely with team Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Wyomingites also strongly backed the nut butter cups, the only state in the West where the confection emerged triumphant as the best seller. Most of the citizens in the West and Great Plains states spent the majority of their Halloween candy dollars on Peanut M&M's, while Oklahoma and Kansas (home to the marshmallow-filled chocolate cup-based confection called Valomilk) defected to the Reese's camp.

The two outliers in Instacart's state-by-state candy purchase assessment were New Hampshire and Hawaii, where regular M&M's won top billing with Halloween shoppers. New Hampshire was the only state in the East and Midwest regions not to ride the Reese's train. There are a lot of popular M&M's flavors out there from caramel to peanut butter, but sometimes a person — or in this case an entire state — is nostalgic for an original.