Welcome to 2026's 31 Days of Heistoween, a daily dose of spooky icons, spine-tingling oddities, and — most harrowing of all — memes. Check back every day from now through October 31 for each daily entry!
Halloween and candy go hand-in-hand — these days, it's pretty much the whole point of the holiday, especially if you're a kid or have kids (yes, also costumes, but those are ultimately just a means to the end, the end being candy).
But not all Halloween candy is created equal, and being good "regular" candy doesn't automatically make you good Halloween candy (except when it does). Here then are the five best candies to reach for when you're out pounding the pavement and ringing doorbells on Halloween.
5. Nerds
When it comes to being a good Halloween candy, the key element to consider is size (unless you trick-or-treat in one of those fancy neighborhoods where everyone just gives out full-sized bars, in which case, just know everyone else is envious of you). For the most part, you want a candy that is still satisfying in its abbreviated Halloween form relative to a "regular" amount of the candy you'd get at other times of the year.
Nerds, however, are the rare exception in which they're good on Halloween because their Halloween size is smaller. No one wants to eat an entire box of Nerds and slip into a diabetic coma, but one of those small trick-or-treat-size boxes of nerds? That's the perfect amount for a satisfying hit of distressingly-crunchy, artificially-flavored sugar.
4. M&M's
The vanilla of candy (ironic since, you know, they're chocolate), M&M's are one of those candies few people love but everyone likes. As such, they make this list for similar reasons as Nerds. Rare does one want to eat an entire bag of plain M&M's (and, sadly, far too few of the more interesting punched-up forms of M&Ms are available in Halloween proportions), but a "fun" size bag is just the right amount of relatively simple chocolate (without being as simple as a blah Hershey's bar) to cleanse the pallet between other, more complex, candy.
3. Snickers
Here we have a superior candy held back by its size. It makes the list because Snickers are awesome, taking the best aspects of earlier versions of candy bars — nougat from 3 Musketeers, the caramel of the Milky Way — and adding peanuts to create the evolutionary peak of the candy bar.
But it's held from the top of this list because the traditional Halloween size Snickers is too damn small (don't even get me started on the even smaller bite-size ones). It's not even half a bar, it's like two bites of a bar, just enough to get your palette excited right before it runs out.
2. Skittles
Similar to M&M's and Nerds, a few Skittles go a long way (the inside of anyone else's cheeks get shredded a bit by eating too many Skittles at once?), and the fun size Halloween bag manages to satisfy your craving for "the rainbow" before you go too far.
I'm generally a "fruity" candy over chocolate person, but if you're the opposite, I wouldn't begrudge you swapping M&M's and Skittles in this list.
1. Reese's Peanut Butter Cup
Remember when I said being good regular candy doesn't automatically make you good Halloween candy? Well, this is the exception that proves the rule. The empirically best candy tops this list because it is, essentially, half a regular Reese's Peanut Butter Cup "bar." A year-round package contains two cups, and the Halloween fun size has one which is (almost, by like half an ounce) the same size as the year-round pack (let's not even talk about the Miniatures with their ridged edges wrapped in gold foil).
The end result is the perfect balance between satisfying and excessive, giving you the full Peanut Butter Cup experience without feeling like you didn't get enough, leaving plenty of room for more candy. And if you do just want to gorge on peanut butter cups (can relate), its easy to map the fun size versions to a regular serving. Eat three? That's one and a half year round peanut butter cup packs. Eat six? You've had three full-size "bars."
All of which makes calculating just how good your Halloween haul was that much easier.
Come knock on our door tomorrow for even more 31 Days of Heistoween treats.
If you haven't already, consider supporting worker-owned media by subscribing to Pop Heist's newsletter or leaving a tip. We are ad-free and operating outside the algorithm, so all dollars go directly to paying the staff members and writers who make articles like this one possible.
