Farmers’ Share of Halloween Treats is So Small, It’s Frightful
October 31, 2025
Trick-or-treat: it’s time to stock up on something sweet!
Americans are forecast to spend $3.9 billion on candy this Halloween, according to the National Retail Federation. That’s up from $3.6 billion last year and $3.1 billion in 2023.
There’s no doubt: Halloween is sweet.
Yet, you might face a fright as you purchase candy for the goblins and ghouls who haunt your door. The price you pay for candy has increased – while the already small amount our farmers receive for the sugar in that candy has decreased.
We looked at the prices for some Halloween-ready bags of multiple trick-or-treat portions and compared them to the same items from our last Halloween survey in 2023.*
In true Halloween horror, the retail price of the items we surveyed increased an average of 19%. But, the cost of sugar in each item decreased an average of 33%. As Dr. Rob Johansson, Director of Economics and Policy Analysis at the American Sugar Alliance, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: This is a markup problem.
The cost of planting, cultivating, harvesting, and processing the sugarbeets and sugarcane that become the real sugar in your favorite Halloween treats has skyrocketed and the prices American sugar producers receive for their sugar has decreased. In just the past two years, prices for beet sugar and cane sugar have fallen by 42% and 24%, respectively.
For example, a bag containing 22 individual fun-sized packages of chocolate candies that was priced at $5.99 in 2023 is now priced at $6.99 in 2025. Yet, the cost of the sugar required to make that bag of candy has decreased from $0.25 in 2023 to $0.16 in 2025. The sugarbeet or sugarcane farmer who grew that crop will receive even less.
Thank you to the sugarbeet and sugarcane farmers who are still hard at work in the fields harvesting and the workers who extract the sugar that makes our Halloween treats so sweet.
*All candies were surveyed at the same grocery store in the Washington, DC, area and are identical in size to the items surveyed in 2023.
Source: American Sugar Alliance
