I love Halloween, especially now that my three trick-or-treaters have grown up, and I am not the parent coping with the giant bag of candy at the end of the night. But we are getting a dwindling number of trick-or-treaters each year. Our numbers have been low…sad, single-digit low.
Halloween is a competitive event, of course, with children competing for the biggest bag of candy, and our house and the other houses on the street competing to have children come ring the bell. It is not a zero-sum game on the street. We benefit if our neighbors have popular treats and our neighbors benefit as we attract customers. Clearly there are good treats streets, dead streets, and must-see streets full of decorations. This year I am determined to do my bit to make our street competitive in the treat department. Trick-or-treating has been reaching extinction levels in our neighborhood.
Last week in the store, I noticed a display of PEZ dispensers in the shape of pumpkin goblins and witches with two little packs of stacked candies per dispenser. Brilliant! Kids love PEZ, not so much for the candies, which are tiny, but for the toy! At $2.49, each pack was way more than we have ever spent per trick-or-treater, but with as little as six kids coming by, this would be not only affordable but likely a great hit with the children.
I bought 16 PEZ dispenser packages, expecting full well, and accepting, that the colorful candy would turn out to have artificial dyes. I just didn’t know which dyes.
From anti-smoking aid to a not-so-innocent candy…
PEZ was invented by the baking powder maker Eduard Haas III in Austria in 1927. PEZ was a mint Haas marketed to people to assist with quitting smoking or overeating.
The PEZ dispenser, created by a product engineer who had experience designing cigarette lighters — it shows in the design he came up with (think BIC lighter) — didn’t appear until 1949.
PEZ was introduced to America in 1952, but Americans at that time were not very interested in quitting smoking. PEZ didn’t sell well.
However, Haas, creating a brilliant success story that can still be found in marketing courses, quickly dropped the adult smoker as his target consumer. In 1955 PEZ added its first two figured dispensers, a robot and a full-body Santa Claus.
Haas changed the candy from mint to fruit flavors and began marketing to children.
Today, the PEZ factory in Connecticut makes 15 billion candies annually for the U.S. and Canada. Billions of dispensers with over 1,500 different figures have been sold around the world: Disney, Star Wars, Republican elephants, Democratic mules, Ninja Turtles, Miss Piggy, Sponge Bob, superheroes. You name it, if it is a character that can be licensed, PEZ has made it. PEZ has stayed so in tune with the times it made Psychedelic Flowers and Psychedelic Hands dispensers in 1968!
An unscientific poll…
I asked some people about their Halloween treat offerings. There was unanimity on two things:
Leftover candy has to be enjoyable, so a lot of chocolate treats that are attractive to adults are in the bowl for the kiddies.
There is no good candy from a nutrition or health perspective, but it is a once-a-year event, so what-the-heck?
On the latter point, Jessica Daniels pointed out the obvious: kids love, love Halloween. Everyone loves Halloween. It is a very special couple of hours when children can go up to their neighbors’ and even to strangers’ doors and ask for and be given candy, safely, with joy. And the kids have fun costumes! And Halloween yard decorations seem to be in a competition with Christmas for most holiday spirit and every year are adding more to the festive spirit.
So, yes, what-the-heck!
But this is a Substack about healthy eating…
Yeah, about those artificial dyes…It turns out that one of them is Red Dye No. 3. Of course, Red 40, Yellows 5 and 6, and Blue 2 are on RFK, Jr. and MAHA’s hit list for dyes to do in, but Red No. 3 is already officially scheduled for extinction in America in 2027 due to its association, at high levels, with cancer in rats. Europe, Canada, California, and now the U.S. as a whole have banned Red No. 3.
So my 16 PEZ packages contained a little bit of Red No. 3 in each strawberry flavor pack. Twelve tiny candies ready to be ejected into delighted mouths by pumpkin goblins and scary witches.
A little worried for my reputation, I took them back to the store for a refund.
What to do? What do you do?
Here is where your help and opinions are needed. Now, a couple of people I asked have seen their kids, or themselves experienced, getting books as treats, and loving it. Other folks gave me ideas for other, much less pricey, non-candy treats like sticky fingers, gel vinyl window stickers, and glow sticks. But generally people just said, “What the heck? Let them eat candy!”
Maybe I should set out both candy and toys for the kids. Good to win favor for next year with both the parents as well as the kids and get the numbers up.
What about the parents’ dilemma?
What about that big bag of candy? I got several reports of parents permitting all the candy you can eat for one night and one night only. The remainder of the candy always disappeared mysteriously either overnight or over the course of a few days.
What about you and your household?
Please share your thoughts and Halloween practices in the comments. Thanks to everyone who shared their Halloween practices for this piece.
Photo credits: PEZ archive except PEZ Giveaway, photographer unknown, and Pumpkin Head PEZ, Ric Bayly.
