National Candy Corn Day makes room for the white, orange and yellow kernels that appear in bowls every autumn and divide every table they land on. Take a handful and eat yours the way you insist is right.
No founder, sponsor or establishing record for National Candy Corn Day has been located. The National Confectioners Association carries the October 30 date on its own candy corn page, without claiming to have created the day.
National Candy Corn Day arrives with an argument already attached to it. In October 2021, YouGov asked 1,188 American adults to choose between pairs of things a neighbour might hand out on Halloween. Candy corn won 40.3 percent of its match-ups.
That put it 59th out of the 76 items on the list. An orange beat it, and so did a beef jerky stick, a caramel apple and a granola bar. Candy corn did hold off a plain apple.
None of which has dented the candy. The National Confectioners Association says the recipe has remained unchanged for more than 100 years. What has changed is the name on the box.
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National Candy Corn Day ran on October 30 without a tracked deal. Browse past offers from previous years.
Making candy corn by hand was a job for a crew. Sugar, corn syrup and other ingredients were cooked into a slurry in large kettles, then softened with fondant and marshmallow. Forty-five pounds of it went into buckets called runners.
Men known as stringers walked backwards along trays of cornstarch pressed with kernel-shaped dents, pouring as they went. It took three passes to lay down the white, yellow and orange. That was the innovation, and it was also the cost.
Candy makers in the 1880s were moulding butter cream into chestnuts, turnips and clover leaves. Samira Kawash, writing in The Atlantic, puts it flatly: the real innovation in candy corn was the layering of three colors.
Tradition credits the idea to George Renninger, a longtime employee of the Wunderle Candy Company in Northern Liberties, working with the company's founder Philip Wunderle. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia dates the collaboration to 1888, and calls it tradition rather than record.
In 1898 the Goelitz Confectionery Company took up the recipe and boxed the kernels with a rooster on the front. It sold them under the name Chicken Feed. The name worked because corn was barely on American tables.
Corn was coarse and cheap then, good food for pigs and chickens. It took wartime wheat shortages in 1917 before any but the poorest Americans would consider corn bread an acceptable food. Around half the nation's labour force lived on farms at the turn of the century.
For the first half of the twentieth century candy corn was penny candy, sold in bulk and eaten all year. It turned up at Thanksgiving parties and in Easter baskets. Brach's joined in 1920.
Halloween took it over later. Kawash records a sharp rise in October advertising from the 1950s, and the more firmly the kernels were filed under one night, the less anyone considered them the rest of the year.
The day itself arrived long after all that, and quietly. Its earliest trace is not an announcement but a reference book: the first appearance of the name in HathiTrust's book corpus is a 2003 entry in Lisa Morton's The Halloween Encyclopedia.
TIMELINE
BY THE NUMBERS
AT A GLANCE
It's the flavor, I think, that puts some people off. It sort of tastes like butter and honey.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
It loses the popularity contests and keeps the bowl.
Candy corn loses the popularity contests and keeps its place in the bowl. The National Confectioners Association's 2013 survey put chocolate first at 72 percent, with candy corn a distant second at 12 percent.
Before machinery, the tri-colour kernels could not be turned out all year. The National Confectioners Association says the lack of it meant candy corn was probably made seasonally, gearing up in late August and running on through the fall.
The kernels no longer belong to one season. Reindeer corn appears at Christmas, cupid corn at Valentine's Day, bunny corn at Easter and freedom corn at the Fourth of July.
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Test your knowledge
No, it is an unofficial observance rather than a public holiday, so October 30 is an ordinary working day. The Federal Register carries no document naming it.
COLOPHON
National Caramel Apple Day arrives on Halloween, the night a whole apple gets to count as candy. Dip a batch at home, or find a candy shop that still coats its own and eat it on the walk back.
Celebrate National Candy Day with delicious treats - indulge your sweet tooth and enjoy your favorite candy flavors!
Candy spends most of the year attached to somebody else's holiday. National Candy Month lets it stand on its own for a while, so pick up something you have not had since childhood and share the bag.
