Candy corn: why 140 years of America's most divisive Halloween candy still divides us

Every Halloween, roughly 35 million pounds of candy corn get produced and distributed across the United States — and a significant portion of the country wishes it wouldn't. More than 48% of Americans say they don't particularly like it, according to a YouGov poll. Yet the triangular, tricolored confection keeps coming back, year after year, outlasting trends and outliving critics. Two food scientists at Colorado State University — one who likes candy corn, one who doesn't — think they know why.

Caitlin Clark, a senior food scientist at CSU's Spur Food Innovation Center in Denver, is firmly in the anti-candy-corn camp. Her objection isn't really about sweetness. It's about texture. She describes it as chalky and off-putting — a reaction her colleague Martha Calvert, who manages the facility's sensory testing services, says is more common than most people realize. Texture, Calvert explains, can often be a bigger turnoff than taste, especially when it's unexpected.

In our experience, all foods are controversial. It's really just a matter of personal preferences, and businesses finding their niche to cater to people who like their products.— Caitlin Clark, Senior Food Scientist, CSU Spur Food Innovation Center

Calvert, who describes herself as more of a candy corn apologist than Clark, breaks down its sensory profile in clinical terms: chalky, dry, crumbly, sweet, cloying, and even slightly nutty. The ingredients responsible for that divisive texture are confectioner's glaze and carnauba wax, which give candy corn its signature shine. The full recipe — sugar, corn syrup, marshmallow creme, fondant, a touch of honey, food coloring, confectioner's glaze, and carnauba wax — produces a confection that also tends to pack into teeth, a quality Clark notes some find particularly irritating, according to CPR News.

Then there's the sweetness. Candy corn's honey-vanilla intensity sets it apart from the Halloween candies that consistently rank most popular — Reese's, Snickers, and Twix — which balance sweet, salty, and other flavors into what Clark and Calvert describe as a more mainstream flavor profile. Candy corn offers no such balance.

Being that it is such a sweet candy, there is a phenomenon at play where the more sugar you regularly consume, the higher tolerance and preference you can have for intensely sweet foods.— Martha Calvert, Sensory Testing Services Manager, CSU Spur Food Innovation Center

So if the texture is off-putting and the sweetness is overwhelming, why does candy corn endure? Both Clark and Calvert point to nostalgia. People have been eating candy corn during fall since the 1950s, when a marketing push specifically positioned it as a Halloween treat. That decades-long association with the holiday has given it an emotional staying power that taste alone couldn't sustain.

I mean, why else would someone eat candy corn if they didn't have good memories of it? There are lots of reasons why people like certain things – sometimes it's nostalgia, sometimes it's family history, sometimes it's just learning to like something that might have a texture or taste that most people aren't used to.— Caitlin Clark, Senior Food Scientist, CSU Spur Food Innovation Center

Many people also associate candy corn with those good feelings that come during Halloween. There's an element of context around food where it's so much more than just how it tastes.— Martha Calvert, Sensory Testing Services Manager, CSU Spur Food Innovation Center

Clark draws a parallel to other foods whose appeal is rooted in seasonal ritual rather than flavor. Pumpkin spice — which often contains no actual pumpkin, just the spices used in pumpkin pie — and apple cider carry similar emotional weight in the fall. She recalls living in Spain, where cabbage with raisins was a beloved Christmas food that functioned as that culture's version of pumpkin spice.

It just has to be whatever you grew up with, right?— Caitlin Clark, Senior Food Scientist, CSU Spur Food Innovation Center

Candy corn's origins predate its Halloween association by decades. It was invented in the 1880s in Philadelphia by George Renninger, an employee at the Wunderle Candy Company, according to the National Confectioners Association. In keeping with a trend among confectioneries to make treats inspired by nature, it was designed to look like corn kernels and initially marketed as faux chicken feed, according to The Wall Street Journal. Its layered tricolor design, combined with a lack of automated machinery at the time, made production difficult and labor-intensive, which is why it became a seasonal item — production runs from late August through the fall. Around the turn of the 20th century, Goelitz Confectionery, now known as Jelly Belly Candy Company, began selling candy corn and is widely credited with producing it at larger scale and marketing it as a Halloween product.

The candy's cultural footprint has only grown stranger with time. Brach's, one of the largest candy corn producers, released a limited-edition non-edible perfume this fall called Ode to Candy Corn, described by parent company Ferrara as smelling "just like the iconic treat tastes." Meanwhile, Reddit threads continue to reliably split between devotees — one user called it the only candy they'd want alongside Reese's Pieces while trick-or-treating — and detractors who describe it as tasting like "nothing or chalk."

For Clark and Calvert, the candy corn debate is ultimately a useful illustration of how food preference works. At CSU Spur's sensory testing lab, Calvert leads multiple taste tests per week in private booths with controlled airflow and lighting designed to minimize outside influences — including nostalgia bias. Her goal is never universal approval.

I'll never find something that 10 out of 10 people all like. But if we can get to six or seven or eight, it becomes something businesses can work with.— Martha Calvert, Sensory Testing Services Manager, CSU Spur Food Innovation Center

Candy corn, by that measure, has always been a business that works — even if it never wins over the majority.

Why it matters — Candy corn's staying power — despite majority disapproval — is a case study in how nostalgia and emotional context can override taste, a dynamic that shapes the entire food industry.

Sources differ on Candy corn invention date: Invented in the 1880s (foxnews.com) vs Invented in 1898 (source.colostate.edu)

Reported by foxnews.com, cpr.org, source.colostate.edu