Last year, America ate its way through 693m pieces of candy branded to celebrate Easter – more specifically, 693,393,389 pieces, or two for every man, woman and child in the country.
That makes Easter the US’s biggest candy season. According to data provided to the Guardian by Nielsen, a market research company, 2015 saw $1.2bn worth of spending.
For the past five years, more units of Easter-branded candy have been sold than candy sold to celebrate Christmas (480m units in 2015), Valentine’s Day (277m) or Halloween (187m).
What exactly is a unit of candy? Nielsen finds it hard to specify, since it can be just about anything – the company’s data is based on reported candy sales from grocery stores, drug stores, mass merchandisers, convenience stores and military commissaries.
Helpfully, though, Nielsen also has data looking at pounds of candy (chocolate and non-chocolate) sold each week of the year. I’ve used population data from the Census Bureau to adjust those numbers as pounds per person.
In an average week, each person in America buys 0.2lb of candy – roughly equivalent to two regular size bags of M&Ms, America’s best-selling candy in 2012. (Remember, per capita numbers always divide between everyone in the country – that includes babies who haven’t tasted solids yet).
In the two weeks before and during Easter in 2015, Americans consumed 0.8lb of candy each. But as you can see in the chart, in terms of pounds per person, peak chocolate week is undoubtedly Halloween.
All together, 4bn pounds of candy were sold last year - the same weight as half a million large male hippos.
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