The 10 Most-Hated Halloween Candies, Ranked from Bad to Worst

To find out which candies people hate the most, bulk candy retailer CandyStore.com looked at 10 years of sales data and 12 independent “best” and “worst” candy rankings, and surveyed 40,000 people. After crunching the numbers, they came out with a definitive list of the worst candies to find in your Halloween haul.

Stay safe, and avoid these 10 terrible “treats.”

These chewy peanut butter candies look decidedly old, and not in a fun, retro way. Kids will look at these yellow and red wrappers and think you bought your candy from the antique mall. The flavor isn’t even particularly good, either. They’re like peanut butter-flavored Bit O’Honey, and eating one is like having peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.

Good & Plenty is a licorice candy, and kids hate licorice so much it’s on the list twice. The colorful candy shells of Good & Plenty are almost a mean trick, because they disguise the licorice. A kid thinks they’re getting a piece of candy, and then as soon as they take a bite they go, “Ugh, licorice!” Good & Plenty is a good candy to hand out if your goal is to troll some children.

This is about black licorice, not red licorice. Kids love Twizzlers and Red Vines, but handing out black licorice at Halloween is a quick way to become the most hated house on the block. Adults might like black licorice; it’s a sophisticated flavor, and many people acquire the taste with age, like they do for things like dark chocolate, espresso, and whiskey. Kids tend to think it’s weird and bitter.

These crunchy little candies are cute and lively, and their fruit flavors are all distinctly different. Something about the little roll they come in just feels special, and it’s fun to watch them roll across the table. The problem with Smarties is that one roll of Smarties is fun, but it’s tough to eat more than that, and kids will get 10,000 rolls of Smarties in their Halloween bags. In Canada, these are called Rockets.

Tootsie Rolls are tiny and chewy and they look like they should taste like chocolate, but they don’t, and that’s cruel. Tootsie Rolls are not the worst candy, but they’re pretty boring, and Halloween is not the time to be boring.

You’ve definitely seen these things, but you might not have known they had an actual name. These are big chunks of what looks like peanut butter-flavored taffy, and they come in plain black and orange wrappers. They’re ubiquitous at Halloween, but they’re mainly useful as a calendar-keeping tool: When a kid’s trick-or-treat bag has nothing left in it but these uneaten orange and black things, fall is officially over.

Necco Wafers must have been designed for kids who want eat sidewalk chalk. They’re basically huge, flat, powdery Smarties with flavors like licorice, clove, and cinnamon. These candies were popular in the 19th century, but we have better candy now.

These always seem like such a great idea. Biting into a tiny wax cola bottle to get a mouth full of the “cola” sounds like tremendous fun, but it’s really just a squirt of sugar water, then you have a mouth full of chewed-up wax. The novelty of these wears off fast.

The second-most-hated candy in America is also the most divisive. A lot of people really, really hate candy corn, which is how it got to the number-two spot on this list. But candy corn’s defenders are passionate about all the great qualities of their favorite candy. Candy corn is really just sugar, shaped into a little triangle, but it still gets points for festivity. Nothing says Halloween like a big bowl of candy corn.

Candy corn inspires intense debate, but nobody is debating the merits of the circus peanut. These are by far the most-hated candy in America. Nothing about a circus peanut makes sense. It’s a chewy orange marshmallow shaped like a peanut, and for some inexplicable reason it tastes like banana. Why would a peanut taste like a banana? This is what would happen if you asked a space alien to invent a fun new candy for human children.

What do you think?