Here’s a useful guide for Halloween candy options

Packs of M&M’s are one of America’s favorite Halloween candy treats, dueling for the top spot in many polls with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Reese’s Pieces. The candy brands run neck-and-neck as the most popular choice of trick-or-treaters.

 

Here’s how Reese’s came to be: 

Harry Burnett Reese became a dairyman for chocolatier Milton Hershey in 1916 and rose to manage the farm in Derry Township within Dauphin County, Pa. Later, Reese worked in the shipping department at The Hershey Company’s chocolate factory. 

In the 1920s, Reese began experimenting in candy making at his home and set up the H.B. Reese Candy Company. He remained friends with Milton Hershey and bought his chocolate from Hershey.

 

In 1928, Reese hit on the recipe formula for his legendary Peanut Butter Cup. Reese was a savvy marketer. Early print advertisements offered “16 Good Reasons to Buy Reese’s.” The ad featured a family photograph: H.B. and wife, Blanche Edna, and their 16 children. 

Reese leveraged his connection to the Hershey community. Each Peanut Butter Cup package carried the banner: “Made in Chocolate Town – So They Must Be Good.”

 

To promote sales, historians said Reese often set up demonstration tables in front windows of department stores (probably in nearby Harrisburg). Sidewalk passersby could view actual candy workers applying the chocolate coating to the candy products. Inside the store, other Reese’s employees would hand out free samples.

 After Reese died in 1956, at age 76, his heirs ran the company for a time, but the Reese family sold out to The Hershey Company in 1963.

 

Other Halloween candies that often rank near the top of the popularity scale include Snickers bars and Skittles (fellow brands of M&M’s – all manufactured by Mars Incorporated).

 

Regular Hershey’s chocolate bars and Hershey’s Kit Kat bars are top choices as well.

 

The Ferrero Group offers a Halloween “trifecta” with Crunch, Butterfinger and Baby Ruth bars. (All are former Nestlé brands.)

 

Try a Whozeewhatzit. It’s a relatively new candy bar, a “line extension” of Hershey’s Whatchamacallit brand.   

Hershey says Whatchmacallit “has a creamy caramel layer with a crispy peanut-flavored rice center” while Whozeewhatzit “has a creamy peanut butter layer with a crispy chocolate creme rice center.”

 

Comedian Gab Bonesso offered her own critique: “They taste the same to me – like Cocoa Krispies cereal.” 

Tempted to distribute a pumpkin-spiced candy to trick-or-treaters who come to your door this year? If so, Chris Brugnola, a junk food blogger, recommends Werther’s Original Pumpkin Spice Soft Caramels.

 

“Werther’s makes a darn good caramel. They’re supremely buttery, creamy-sweet, a little salty, and they offer a nice chew,” he said. Werther’s offers just “a touch of pumpkin spice – really, really subtle.” Try pairing them with Werther’s Caramel Apple Soft Caramels. 

(Werther’s was founded in 1903 in the small town of Werther in Westphalia. Germany.) 

It might be fun this Halloween season “to go retro.” 

Still available are old-time candies such as Chuckles fruity, jellied sugar candies. Invented in 1921 in Danville, Ill., Chuckles has five pieces in each package. The flavors are cherry, lemon, lime, orange and black licorice. The brand has been passed around a lot and is now part of Ferrara Candy Company of Chicago.

 

The Bun cluster is yet another “taste blast from the past.” Invented in the 1920s in Fort Wayne, Ind., each cluster of chocolate and peanuts contains one of three fillings – vanilla, maple or caramel. The brand is now part of Pearson’s, a candy company based in Saint Paul, Minn.

 

Buns are so throw-back good.