Most popular halloween candy by state

By Ben George ben@candystore.com

Halloween is in for a major come-back this year. For better or worse, folks are getting their lives back closer to normal again. And we predict a big Halloween this year. To help you get the right candy, we gathered 14 years of data for this map of 2021’s Most Popular Halloween Candy in the US by state.

Last year was a weird year for Halloween and trick-or-treating. No one was vaccinated and there was a fall surge in covid. The uncertainty was even greater then than now. But we do feel like this year Halloween will reach and maybe eclipse it’s former pre-pandemic peak.

Disclaimer: We at CandyStore.com recommend you monitor your local situation and follow health guidelines if you plan to trick-or-treat. Pay attention to local trends and do your own research.

According to the National Retail Federation, Halloween candy spending should hit a whopping $3Billion this year! That’s a 20% increase over last year and 10% over the previous all-time high. That’s a big deal.

Source: CandyStore.com.

Overall Halloween spending is predicted to be over $10Billion. That’s up 26% over last year. Bring on Halloween!

The map above reveals the results of our annual data mining, the top 3 most popular Halloween candies in each state. Hover over your state to see the goods. (Apologies, it’s not interactive on mobile devices).

Last year we had a cyberpunk future theme, and this year we went a bit more topical with our prediction of the future. In honor of the simultaneous rise of Terminators from Cyberdine humanoid robots from Tesla and Bitcoin this year, our 2021 map design is something we think HAL 9000 would appreciate.

So, please enjoy the results in the fun map above. Do your state’s choices surprise you? The top Halloween candy in your state are not always what you think they were. Salt water taffy and Hot Tamales performed much better than some expected, for example.

For over 14 years, we’ve been delivering bulk candy around the country. As bulk candy retailers and distributors, we’ve got a lot of candy sales data to comb through. Including some we shipped to New York in recent years…

We have seen a lot of surprising favorites and least favorites over the years. That’s why working with unbiased data is so much fun. We looked at 14 years of sales data (2007-2021), looking in particular at the months leading up to Halloween. We sell nationwide (and to Canada) so we broke down our sales by state. We also have relationships with major candy manufacturers and distributors – all of whom contributed and helped us reach our conclusions.

Then we charted the best sellers in every state for Halloween. And we present it to you in the above futuristic interactive map of the most popular Halloween candy. If you’d like to see the nationwide winners, we made a graphic for that too:

As mentioned above, the National Retail Federation is estimating that shoppers will spend $2.72 billion on Halloween candy.

As you might expect, consumer confidence is still down a bit (-5%) this year, fueled mostly by uncertainty surrounding delta variant and vaccine booster outlook.

So, what candy do people in your area like? If you get the wrong thing, the consequences could be dire. The inverse of treat is trick, as we all know. Streaming TP from your tree limbs? Ok hopefully kids in your neighborhood wouldn’t do that. But the adults might :|