As we near the culmination of Spooky Season, #TheDiscourse has transitioned as usual to talk of favorite candies and best costumes.
Already this month, Reader’s Digest and Newsweek have analyzed data about each state’s favorite candy (NC apparently plays it safe with the plain Hershey’s chocolate bar); Food & Wine has identified the most popular candy nationwide (Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, unsurprisingly); and every platform from Yahoo to NY Mag has offered a rundown of trending 2025 costumes (keep an eye out for K-Pop Demon Hunters and Popes Leo). Some tech platforms have even gotten in on the action: Gizmodo identified the “most unhinged” Halloween costumes and The Verge has been exploring AI-generated seasonal decorations.
Naturally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t also share some Halloween stances. I have thus conducted thorough polling at the GrepBeat HQ and throughout the CVEU (Colopy Ventures Extended Universe) to identify your GrepBeat/Primordial/Jurassic teams’ candy and costume preferences. Then, using Google Sheets a proprietary AI model, I organized the findings into the following bar graph compendium of visualized data.
Some key findings to help you understand the context and theories behind the data:
- Other candies receiving votes, but not reaching the double-digit point threshold for inclusion, included: Sixlets (you’re all wrong for not loving Sixlets), Blow Pops, York Patties, Tootsie Rolls, M&Ms, Almond Joy, Hershey Bars (Based on our sample of up to nine individuals, I am officially calling external findings re: Hershey as NC’s favorite candy into question), Lindt truffles, Hershey kisses, SweeTarts, and in the upset of the century, just in any category or field, Reese’s Pieces.
- Until today, I did not realize it wasn’t just “Sweet Tarts.”
- All votes for Candy Corn were made specifically for “Candy Corn but the ones that are pumpkin-shaped,” but that was more trouble than it was worth to write into the x-axis.
- Despite tying for second-most popular candy in an office with relatively few dads, Crunch Bar was labeled, by members of a generation that just got “67” named word of the year at Dictionary.com, as “such a dad choice.”
- Once again, Sixlets are delicious and were robbed of proper consideration by Big Convenience Store, which has sought to remove them from shelves and relegate them to “’90s Kid Nostalgia” type social media posts.
Alongside candy preferences, I also asked members of the CVEU to share favorite costume concepts and/or images of said costumes and/or past jacks-o-lantern. So in the spirit of the season, please enjoy the following photos.
