The Best And Worst Candy To Hand Out On Halloween

Halloween is coming, and once we get the municipal regulations sorted out as to just which day and time to expect height-challenged ghoulies and ghosties (or more like baby sharks, Area 51 aliens, Impossible Burgers, and whatever else all the cool moms are dressing their kiddos up as this year), it's time to start planning the best strategies for leaving all the lights off and pretending we're not home. 

Whoops, no. Of course, we totally mean what kind of Halloween candy should we buy so the pint-size protection racketeers don't end up TPing our houses? And when it comes to determining the best of the best (and worst of the worst), who better than those sweeties over at CandyStore.com? They not only surveyed 30,000 of their own customers as to candy preferences, but also analyzed the data from the social scientists at BuzzFeed, Business Insider, Huffington Post, Fox News, PlayBuzz, Houston Press, Bon Appetit, Hello Giggles, The Week, Thrillist, Mental Floss, and 24/7 Wall Street (they're nothing if not thorough). And, according to all this research? The survey results were... not terribly surprising.

Could Halloween's favorite candy be anything other than Reese's? This was pretty much a blowout victory, as Reese's Peanut Butter Cups came right at the top of just about every "best trick-or-treat" list. No surprise, really. Reese's are one candy with an almost-universal appeal (except for those who are unfortunately allergic). They are sweet, but not too sweet, salty, but just a little, and substantial enough — even the tiny ones — to make you feel you've actually had a mini-meal of sorts. The one downside of Halloween Reese's, if you're a kid, is that this particular candy is practically guaranteed to be mysteriously half-vanished by the morning after trick-or-treating. How could this be? Just ask Mommy (she'll tell you Daddy's to blame).

Shockingly enough, everyone's most-hated candy isn't the dreaded circus peanuts, although those did come in at number two. 2019's new worst candy, knocking circus peanuts off the bottom rung, was... candy corn. These sickly-sweet nasty little morsels that seem to pop up everywhere around Halloween have by now lost any popularity they might once have enjoyed in some long-ago distant age, and are now a bigger joke than pumpkin spice everything — the joke being that some people do still enjoy pumpkin spice, but hardly anyone (except one blogger with Candystore.com) will admit to enjoying candy corn. If you can even find candy corn individually packaged for Halloween distribution, you should still pass on this "treat" — unless, of course, you enjoy a little holiday schadenfreude, and/or you're running low on toilet paper and don't mind unrolling it from your trees and shrubbery.

And should you be the unfortunate recipient of an excess amount of candy corn (i.e. any amount), it is NOT recommended that you use it as a pizza topping, as this makes it, if anything, even more horrible.