We Rate Popular Halloween Candies From Worst To Best

The best part of Halloween is the candy. Dressing up can be cool, scary movies can be fun, and Halloween parties and haunted housescan be a good time, but the candy is ultimately what you came for. Whether you're stuffing your trick-or-treat bags with fun-sized chocolate bars or you're filling your pockets with sour and sweet candies, you know what the good stuff is versus the nasty stuff floating around out there.

Licorice? Yuck. Life Savers? No thanks. Dubble Bubble gum? Get away from me! You don't want to waste valuable tummy and Halloween bag space with trash like that. You want the good stuff. The stuff with nougat and peanuts and coconut and rainbow flavors with a sour coating. But you really should know the lay of the land when it comes to Halloween candy. There is a ranking, especially if you find yourself trading say, a Reese's for an Almond Joy.
 
The Daily Meal has rated the most popular Halloween candies from worst to best to provide some illumination to its readers on what candies actually reign supreme. The most popular candies that people pass out to children (and adults!) are not necessarily the best– at least in our (entirely subjective) opinion. So grab a handful of M&M's or some of those red and blue Sour Patch Kids and discover just how we rate the most popular Halloween candies from worst to best.

#25 Life Savers

Does anyone actually eat the Life Savers in their trick-or-treat bags? If they're not fruit flavored, they're mint. While mints are great for after-dinner breath freshening, kids just don't want these! They taste terrible. What monster is giving these out to people?

#24 Dubble Bubble Gum

Dubble Bubble gum is chalky and sticks to your teeth in the most unpleasant way. I don't think anyone actually hand-selects this kind of candy — it probably had to stow away in a mixed bag of treats, because it's nasty! Please stop offering it to children. Also, it gets hard in your mouth in like four seconds.

#23 Licorice

Licorice is a polarizing candy. It doesn't matter if it's Twizzlers or Red Vines, most people don't want it. Especially if it's black licorice — yuck! Shockingly, you can actually overdose on the stuff.

#22 Taffy

Salt water taffy is fine for summer, but it's a nightmare on Halloween. It's a total gamble when you get it in your bag, because you rarely know what flavor it will be. It also comes in some truly suspect packaging — it's hard to trust something when a stranger hands it to you wrapped in unlabeled wax paper.

#21 Lemonheads

Lemonheads feel like the baseline for candy. They're... fine. You'll eat them if you have nothing left or trade them for better things if you can, but they're not too exciting.

#20 Hot Tamales

We're starting to get into actually tasty candy. However, too many Hot Tamales can be too spicy and hurt your mouth. You can only eat about a few at a time if you don't want to burn your tongue. Despite this, they're absurdly popular; almost 1.5 million pounds of the spicy candy are sold each year. Clearly some people don't mind giving kids a burnt tongue.

#19 Hershey’s Mini Bars

It's chocolate. It's plain chocolate. Yeah, it's good, but it doesn't have any of the exciting bits to it like nuts or caramel or crunch.

#18 Swedish Fish

Justice for Swedish Fish! They're actually so good! The gummies are stretchy and chewy and delicious. The red flavor isn't sickly (it's rumored to be lingonberry), and if you get multi-color Swedish Fish in your trick-or-treat bag, they're worth their weight in gold.

#17 Blow Pops

Blow Pops would rank higher if the gum inside of them was better. Sure, the shape and taste of the lollipop shell is great, but the gum inside is disappointing — and if you're still chewing on boring gum, you have to wait to gorge on the rest of your candy.

#16 Jolly Ranchers

We love Jolly Ranchers because the flavors are so mouthwatering. They're pretty, they're portable, and the watermelon flavor is insanely addictive. Plus, it's super fun how they stain your tongue.

#15 Tootsie Pops

Tootsie Pops beat Blow Pops because the Tootsie Roll center is delicious. They come in great flavors, you don't feel like you have to throw them away once you get to the center, and they're fun to lick! And who can forget those iconic Tootsie Pop commercials? "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?"

#14 Candy Corn

This may be a divisive opinion, but this seasonal treat is great. We're not here for the candy corn-haters. These tri-colored, vanilla-flavored triangles are aesthetically pleasing and incredibly tasty, unless you're putting them on top of pizza.

#13 Starburst

Starbursts are one of the greatest Halloween candies, especially if you get some in any flavor combination besides the original mix — the tropical assortment is the best. According to our research, 1,705,007 pounds of Starburst are bought for Halloween; let's hope there are plenty of pink ones in there!

#12 Skittles

Skittles are Halloween candy currency. If you're trading a bag of Skittles for something, you know it's important because these rainbow-colored candies are valuable. The value doubles if they're sour skittles. In the U.K. and Sweden, purple Skittles are actually blackcurrant-flavored, not grape as they are in the U.S.!

#11 M&M’s

There is no one who will ever say no to M&M's. The little brown packaging they come in is friendly and familiar. They're the perfect handful of chocolate and color. However you eat them — suck on them until they're gray, or crunch them up immediately — M&M's are a Halloween candy staple. Love M&M's so much you want your own massive supply? Target is selling a bucket of M&M's.

#10 Whoppers

Getting a bag of Whoppers in your Halloween bag is always a wonderful surprise. These chocolate-covered malt balls are delicious and covetable — and never for trading, honestly. Savor them.

#9 Kit Kat

Gimme a break, gimme a break... if you found a full-sized Kit Kat in your plastic jack-o'-lantern you would gobble it up instantly. This spooky season there are even Kit Kats that glow in the dark!

#8 3 Musketeers

3 Musketeers bars are perhaps the most refined candy on this list. The soft, nougaty center is perfect as it is or after you've tossed it in the fridge or the freezer to make it nice and cold. It's a perfectly conceived chocolate bar that's as delicious to adults as it is to children.

#7 Milky Way

Since a Milky Way is just a 3 Musketeers with caramel, it earns one spot higher than its predecessor. (Halloween is one time when overkill is actually desirable.) Plus, there are no dark chocolate 3 Musketeers — but there are dark chocolate Milky Ways, and those are simply divine.

#6 Butterfinger

If your parents let you eat Butterfingers as a kid, they didn't care about your teeth, but they cared about your happiness. These crumbly chocolate bars have a way of sticking to every crevice of each tooth, but man, do they taste amazing. Sometimes they get so hard you can't bite them at all. But it's fun to try!

#5 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups

Unless you have a peanut allergy, no one says no to a Reese's cup. They're so cute and small and taste absolutely amazing. It's peanut butter and chocolate! What's not to love? Did you know Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are the best-selling candy brand at American convenience stores by far, selling 62 percent more than the closest competition? And that during the Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, and Holiday seasons, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups make up 47 percent of all candy sold? Now you do!

#4 Almond Joy

The only coconut chocolate bar on this list, and the only popular coconut chocolate bar. (No one has ever actually heard of Mounds; please stop trying to make it happen.) As a kid, you would never trade an Almond Joy. These are heaven. These are perfect — unless you hate coconut.

#3 Twix

There are a bunch of ways to eat a Twix, but any way you do, it's delicious. Whether you're choosing to eat all the caramel and chocolate off the top and then the cookie, or bite all the chocolate off the sides, or take one big satisfying bite, you know Twix are near the top of the Halloween candy hierarchy. Did you know the word "Twix" is actually a mashup of "twin bix," "bix" being British shorthand for biscuits?

#2 Snickers

Your parents 100 percent tried to steal your Snickers bars out of your Halloween bag when you were little, and why wouldn't they? They're so good. Caramel, nougat, peanuts, chocolate — even the fun-sized version was just about the best thing you ever ate.

#1 Sour Patch Kids

Sour Patch Kids are the best Halloween candy. This candy is sweet, tangy, sour, rainbow-colored, and fun. Plus, once you've eaten all the little kid-shaped candies, there is always a corner of your bag with leftover sour powder that feels like a true kiss from the almighty the second you put it on your tongue. Clearly that's why these tart gummies are one of the most popular Halloween candies in America.

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