Worst Halloween candies, according to the data

After a night of trick-or-treating, the candy gets dumped on the table and we take inventory of the sweet bounty. There are the favorites, and then there is the small pile on the side that no one likes. What usually lands in the throwaway pile?

Some years ago, FiveThirtyEight placed candies head-to-head and calculated the win percentage of each. The site is closed, but some of the data lives on. Below are the results for chocolate and non-chocolate candies.

Chocolate vs. non-chocolate candy

Circles are sized by price percentile, so larger circles means more expensive.

Chocolate is heavily favored. People seem to really like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

Nik-L-Nip, the candy with wax bottles, had the lowest win percentage. Chiclets and Boston Baked Beans were almost as low. These are non-chocolates.

Sixlets are the lowest rated chocolate candy, which surprises me, because my kids discovered Sixlets this year and they are the favorite. Charleston Chew was the lowest rated chocolate bar. I agree with that one.

There are more candies though outside of the FiveThirtyEight results. The Candy Hierarchy used to run annually and asked people to rate candies and bring feelings of joy, despair, or meh. I wondered if the results from the two surveys matched confectioner sentiment. Here are the percentages for the feelings plotted against win percentage:

Joy, despair, and meh correlated with winning

Higher win rate means more joy and less despair.

Not all the candies from FiveThirtyEight were in the Candy Hierarchy and vice versa, so the above are only the overlapping selections.

There is a strong correlation, which was unexpected for two internet surveys about Halloween candy. Candies with higher win percentage had more joy and less despair. The meh, an emotion of indifference, showed a weaker correlation and slope.

So I feel comfortable feeding off both surveys to find the worst candies. Despair seems like the right choice to compare.

“Those odd marshmallow circus peanut things,” also known as Circus Peanuts, had a high despair rating at 72%. Using the fitted line, this is the equivalent of a 6.7% win percentage. That makes Circus Peanuts the lowest rated candy. Although I feel like the naming mechanism of “Those odd marshmallow circus peanut things” sways the results.

If we look for a properly named candy with the highest despair, we get Black Jacks with an equivalent 21% win rating. That puts Black Jacks just below the 22% for Nik-L-Nip. Black licorice was not far behind at 22%. Black Jacks appears to be the worst.

As for chocolate bars, Reggie Jackson bars and Coffee Crisp are tied at 34% win rate equivalent, making them worse than Charleston Chew.

Case closed.