The Worst Chocolate Candy To Get On Halloween, According To 26% Of People

With Halloween right around the corner, candy and chocolate brands are kicking their marketing into high gear: M&M's recently brought back its popular Cookies and Scream flavor (via Instagram); Starburst has debuted a new fruit-chew-style lollipop (per Best Products); Halloween Snickers are on sale; and Reese's Pumpkins are (finally) back on the market.

Some Halloween candies, however, are less keenly anticipated than others. For example, can you remember the last time you had a hankering for a Circus Peanut (those neon-orange, nut-shaped marshmallow pieces that look like insulation foam)? It probably wasn't recently. (As it happens — Circus Peanuts are actually the most popular candy in Oklahoma, according to a recent Zippia study! Truly, in matters of taste there can be no dispute.) Is anyone counting down the days until Smarties-season? Or eagerly awaiting their yearly fix of Good & Plenty? The only greater mystery than who still eats these candies is who still hands them out.

Opinions aside, we wanted to get to the bottom of the "Worst Halloween Candy" question, and so Mashed ran a nationwide survey, polling over 600 Americans about their least favorite seasonal treats.

A note on the methodology: The survey was limited to the worst chocolate candy to get on Halloween and does not include other sugar-based candies — partly because there's an apples-to-oranges thing going on, and partly because the world of second-rate sugar candy is just too vast. As it happens, the world of second-rate chocolate is also pretty vast, but several clear "winners" emerged from the survey.

For the most part, respondents were fans of Halloween chocolates like 3 Musketeers, Baby Ruth, M&M's, and Hershey's bars. Coming in at third with just over 21% of the vote are Junior Mints, everyone's favorite toothpaste-flavored chocolate. Second place goes to Almond Joy, which scored about a quarter of the vote. And with a comfortable 2% margin, the title of "Worst Halloween Chocolate" goes to ... Milk Duds! At 26% of the vote, the extremely chewy, vaguely chocolate-and-caramel-flavored, bite-size candy is officially considered the worst chocolate you can receive on Halloween. As Twitter user Deke Zucker once put it, Milk Duds are "the ones you only ate when everything else was long gone," (via Twitter).