The Top Halloween Candy in Your State Probably Isn’t What You Think

As a child, Halloween was probably my favorite holiday of the calendar year.

As an adult, Halloween is definitely my favorite holiday of the calendar year. Sure, I no longer get to experience the hedonistic joy of going from house to house, begging strangers for candy, but hey, I have a job, right? Turns out, you can just buy a bunch of candy at the store, and no one knows you didn’t put in hours of work to obtain it! What a country!

Still, there’s something magical for kids about the art of trick ‘r treating. Perhaps it’s the randomness and the lottery nature of the candy you receive—as you walk up to each house, you’re basically trying to strike it rich with the candy variety of your dreams. Sometimes you strike out (toothpaste, dehydrated apple slices … Raisinets), but sometimes you hit a home run (full size bars!), and the resulting rush of achievement is something I still remember fondly to this day.

As it happens, though, what kind of candy you receive is actually highly dependent upon where you reside in the U.S.A. Using 11 years of sales data, the website CandyStore.com generates a yearly list of the most popular Halloween candy purchased in each state, and they happen to be remarkably different, depending on where you are. All in all, more than $2.6 billion is estimated to be spent on trick-or-treating, which makes the below map into a representation of big candy business. Intriguingly, a significant percentage of that candy is now being purchased online.

Let’s call out some of the particular oddities here.