2026 Candy Conundrum

As most people are probably already painfully aware, inflation and food prices are through the roof. We joined a warehouse club back in 2023 so that we could get reasonable prices on 36 count cases of popular full sized candy bars. What cost $31 to $33/case in 2023, now run $42 to $43/case in 2026. Over the past 16 Halloweens of living in this neighborhood, we average ~ 100 trick-or-treaters/year. However, from 2021 to 2024, the average upticks to 123. And 2024 was our highest count ever with 142 trick-or-treaters. So we've been buying at least 144 full sized candy bars plus some bonus candy/emergency reserves because our development has been expanding in recent years, with 10 out of 33 future new homes already built over the past few years. We're rurally located in a town/county that is mostly agricultural (apples, corn, cows, and horses), so we also get a lot of car transported trick-or-treaters because many of the kids out here don't have access to large groups of homes. Last year, the weather for Halloween was the worst ever since living in our current neighborhood, and we only got 75 trick-or-treaters. We had a ton of candy left over. So you can see the "candy conundrum" we're in now. It's getting really hard to predict how much candy we need to have on hand for Halloween. Plus, we're really not happy with the quality of the common popular candy bars these days. Having grown up in the 70s we swear all those candy bars were much better quality back then. So we're planning on phasing out full sized candy bars and going with smaller sized but better quality individually wrapped chocolates for Halloween 2026. Potential candidates are 1) Tony's Chocolonely and 2) Ghirardelli Squares or a mixture of the two, along with either fun sized packs of Skittles or Sour Patch Kids Zombies for bonus/emergency reserves (Mr. Haunted Eve loves Skittles, and kids seem to really love Sour Patch Kids). 2 or 3 small pieces of these better quality chocolates are considered a serving size and actually come out cheaper in cost than a single full sized candy bar. Plus we get the flexibility of scaling down or up the hand out portions depending on how Halloween night pans out. If we get stuck with lots of leftovers, at least we'll enjoy eating them! 😉