But have you ever thought about where those delicious sweet treats come from?

Well, besides that plastic pumpkin on the porch of the house with the lights off that says one piece per kid.

Today on Weird History Food, we're talking the bizarre backstory of your favorite Halloween candy.

But before we begin, remember to click that little like and subscribe button and leave a comment about what food you'd like to see covered on our next episode.

Now let's dump our bags on the floor because we're ready to dig in.

First up, we have the most polarizing treat on the market, candy corn.

Originally known as chicken feed, it was created by wonderly candy company George Renninger in the 1880s.

By 1889, candy corn was also being produced by Goelitz Confectionary, known today as Jelly

Belly of jelly bean fame.

Today, most candy corn is actually manufactured by Brock's Confections because no one thought enough of candy corn to bother trademarking it.

People loved agriculture-themed candy, and the 19th century saw a slew of buttercream confections aimed at the rural markets.

Think candy chestnuts, candy clovers, and candy turnips.

Originally designed as more of a seasonal candy, the brightly flavored morsels, meant to look like pieces of corn on the cob, didn't catch on as a Halloween-specific staple until around 1950.

Around 35 million tons of candy corn are produced every year, or 9 billion pieces of individual candy.

We also recommend eating candy corn with salted peanuts.

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?

Depending on what bird you ask, the answers may vary.

For the benefit of a great and necessary field of research, there have been several scientific experiments to uncover the secret lick count of the elusive lollipop.

Purdue researchers built a licking machine to go at it and came to a final tally of 364, which spurred a University of Michigan student to build his own licking machine, averaging 411 licks.

At which point, we hope, someone sat the deans of these very prestigious colleges down to have a serious discussion about what projects their grant money was funding.

Meanwhile, mathematicians at NYU came up with 1,000 licks, based on calculations regarding the solubility of hard sugar.

But Florida scientists came up with double that amount.

So, the answer is it takes somewhere between 364 and 2,000 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

Like the mysteries of Stonehenge and the Pyramids, Tootsie Pops are one of the last remaining mysteries that science cannot explain.

Another enduring mystery of the Tootsie Pop is what we like to call the Curse of the Starred

Wrapper.

Growing up, you may have heard a rumor that finding the image of a star on your Tootsie wrapper was a golden ticket.

If you sent your wrapper in, Tootsie Roll Industries would net you some sort of Willy

Wonka-esque prize.

Cash?

Cavities for life, maybe?

As it turns out, neither.

The company debunked the rumor on its website, saying, in fact, shooting star appears on one in every four to six Tootsie Pop wrappers, just as frequent as the other images appear.

However, we do believe the star is a sign of good luck to come.

Since the 80s, Tootsie has responded to the mailers with a consolation prize, a story of a Native American shooting the star down with a bow and arrow and turning it into candy.

That honestly raises more questions than it answers.

Today, Tootsie Roll Industries is one of the largest candy makers in the world, churning out 64 million morsels every day.

Its legacy can be traced to its progenitor, the Tootsie Roll.

Created at the turn of the century by Austrian-American candy man Leo Hirschfeld, he patented the formula in 1907.

Snickers

The only candy that you can reasonably get away with calling a meal.

It's like we added ground-up peanuts to something and suddenly it's lunch.

Snickers entered the market in the 1930s, named after the favorite horse of the Mars family, the dynasty behind Mars Bars, Milky Ways, Three Musketeers, Twix, basically anything with nougat.

Snickers is the crowning jewel in Mars, Inc.'s sticky chocolate crown.

It is the number one candy sold in the entire world, bringing in $3.6 billion brought in annually on that one bar alone.

That really satisfies.

With over 15 million Snickers made daily, you'd think the quality control of Snickers would be a little lax, but no.

Every bar has exactly 16 ground-up peanuts.

The production of Snickers is so tightly regulated that it was a big deal in 2009 when the weight of the bars was reduced by 9% to prevent overeating.

The weight of Snickers has actually varied wildly over the years.

It started at 2.5 ounces and ballooned up to 2.75 in 1940 before seeing its weight halved the following decade.

Hershey's Kisses

What's more enticing as a kid than seeing those little drops covered in shiny foil with a perfect piece of paper sticking out?

Any teacher who passed them out was a legend.

However, one thing our educational system failed to inform us was that the chocolates we know and love weren't created by Hershey's at all.

In 1894, a candy man named Henry Oscar Wilbur invented a sweet by pouring melted chocolate into a tear-shaped mold with a raised insignia reading, Wilbur.

He called them Wilbur's Buds.

During this time, Milton Hershey, a real Henry Ford of the confectionary world, was figuring out ways to automate the production line for the 1900 release of his Hershey chocolate bar.

He saw teardrop shapes could easily be replicated by squirting chocolate onto a flat surface, saving a bunch of time and, one assumes, mold money.

Hershey's Kisses were released 14 years after Wilbur's Buds, but the Kiss immediately outsold Buds on the market in 1907, even though the two were basically identical.

But Buds still chugged along keeping pace with the Kiss and various other competitors until 1921, which is when Hershey updated his factories to automate the silver foiling process.

Buds, which had been using the foil since its inception, couldn't keep up with the speed in Hershey's mass production.

He went on to sue Milton for stealing his idea.

Considering Hershey's remains a brand name over 120 years later, and nobody has ever heard of Wilbur's Buds unless they're lying to impress you.

Today, the Hershey empire ranks up there as one of the Big Four chocolatiers, alongside

Mars, Cadbury, and Nestle, a lot of it due to Milton Hershey's factory innovations rather than his original ideas for candy.

Kisses wasn't even an original name for the treats.

An 1856 Webster Dictionary definition for the word already described it as a small piece of confectionery.

It would take Hershey's 95 years till they were able to secure the Kisses trademark in 2001, after a survey found that most people already associated the phrase with the product.

Sour Patch Kids – The mouth-puckering sour gummy candy that's shaped like kids.

Not the most obvious choice for a popular treat, what with the implicit candy cannibalism and the fact that they tend to stick to your teeth.

Originally named Mars Men, Sour Patch was created by a guy named Frank Galatoli while he was working for Jared International in Ontario back in the early 70s.

By the time the candy made it to America in 1985, Cabbage Patch Kids were all the rage.

Martian men became human children as the brand attempted to cash in on the Cabbage Patch trend.

The candy even got a new mascot, a toe-headed blonde boy with his tongue lolling out on the cover of the packs.

This boy was based on Galatoli's son, Scott, and again leads to some troubling questions.

Is the mascot the consumer of the candy, or the child whose likeness you're chomping on?

Is it both?

Chemistry plays a huge part in the Sour Patch formula.

The gummy's coating of tartaric and citric acid, which are activated by protons in saliva, registers on the tongue as sour.

There was even an official Sour Patch Kids cereal.

You know, what kid doesn't want to wake up in the morning to sour-tasting milk?

Sour Patch Kids also joins the ranks of sweets who have branched into ice cream and video games.

Shout out to anyone who remembers Capcom's 2011 World Gone Sour on PlayStation.

The candy also has the unique distinction of having been used in a beer.

Mob Craft Beer introduced Sour Catch, a Belgian pale ale flavored with the candy, in 2009.

It was sold out by Halloween.

If you like your jellybeans big and spicy, shaped like a pill, and tasting like pungent cinnamon, Hot Tamales are the candy for you.

Created in the 1950s by the mad scientists at Just Born Incorporated, Hot Tamale fit in amid the ranks of their other offerings, Mike and Ike's, Peeps', and Peanut Chew's as candy people either love or would rather die than eat.

The movie theater concession staple was named the number one cinnamon candy in America in 1999, which is really the ultimate in consolation prizes.

I mean, how many other cinnamon candies can you even name?

Cinnamon has a long and storied history as a sweet treat.

It contains the chemical cinnamaldehyde, which is a skin irritant.

So naturally, humans throughout time have been hell-bent on eating it.

Cinnamon can be found in the Bible, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Sanskrit.

By the 19th century, we'd figured out how to isolate cinnamaldehyde and put it directly into medicine and, uh, candies.

Red Hot's, the predecessor to Hot Tamales, first hit the markets in the 1930s.

And ever since then, we've been upping the Hot Tamales ante.

There's Super Hot Tamales, 2011's Three Alarm Tamales, and Hot Tamale, Fire and Ice.

Debuting in 2018, Fire and Ice mixed a discontinued Spearmint variant in with Cinnamon Hot Tamales, creating a mouthfeel equivalent of the series finale of Game of Thrones.

So less of a song of ice and fire and more of a scream.

M&M's – Melts in your mouth, not in your hand

While that slogan may sound cute and somewhat dirty, the original slogan for the hard-shelled

Mars chocolates actually has a pretty dark history.

In 1937, H.I.

Roundtree and Company in England began producing a small, hard-shelled candy to sell to British soldiers fighting the Spanish Civil War.

Originally called Smarties, not to be confused with the other Smarties candy, they were pitched as snacks that wouldn't go gooey in the heat, keeping hands clean and combat-ready.

Working at Roundtree at the time was a shrewd candy man named Forrest Mars, the estranged son of Frank Mars.

The father and son had a falling out over who invented the Milky Way bar.

The Mars family had all kinds of drama going on behind the scenes.

Forrest realized candy sales dropped in the summer, specifically chocolate, which tended to melt in your hand, your purse, or the back pocket of your white linen pants right before an interview.

A small, portable, non-melty chocolate candy was just the ace in the hole Forrest needed to return to America with his head held high.

He received a patent for his borrowed candy idea in 1941.

When World War II broke out, America began rationing.

Hershey's had been given control of 100% of the nation's chocolate.

Instead of returning to his family, Forrest came up with a plan.

He approached Bruce Murray, the son of Hershey's president William Murray, with a proposition from one passed-over kid to another.

What if they formed their own chocolate company?

And that's how the Mars and Murray Company, or M&M, was born.

Originally, their candy was offered exclusively to American forces, but the G.I.s took them home.

By the time the war ended and it was made available to civilians, M&M's already had a head start on cornering the market as the chocolate that won't swap up your clothes.

Skittles, nature's fruit-flavored M&M's Skittles are produced by Wrigley's, which is owned by none other than Mars Inc., who did eventually get the M&M license when Forrest rejoined his father's company.

This really needs to be a gripping succession-style drama.

But while the candies may look alike and, in the case of 2007's chocolate-mixed Skittles and key lime pie M&M's, occasionally share a wrapper, they couldn't be more different.

While M&M had a famous backstory tied to the most significant war in modern history, the birth of Skittles is a mystery.

No one knows who invented Skittles!

Most sources point to an uncredited British company as the first producer of Skittles in 1974, before the candy magically appeared in America five years later.

According to 1994's Taste the Rainbow campaign, a man named Mr. Skittles invented a namesake candy after looking at a rainbow.

In actuality, Skittles probably came from the European game called Skittles, which uses a slightly smaller bowling ball that comes in a variety of colors.

Many prefer the Mr. Skittles story.

We save the best for last, and obviously, it's Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

And before you ask, no, that's not personal preference talking.

It's an unbiased and immutable law of nature.

Harry Burnett Reese, H.B. to his friends, began working at Hershey's Chocolate Factory in 1921, which is not the fun Wonka-esque experience it sounds like.

Reese didn't have a lot of options.

He'd had to work three and sometimes four jobs to bring in enough money to feed his wife and 16 kids.

That's, uh, too many kids, Reese.

Talk about Reese's pieces.

During his five-year tenure, Reese developed a prescient philosophy.

If Hershey's can sell a trainload of chocolates every day, he later said, I can at least make a living making candy.

Reese spent five years working at Hershey's, taking scrupulous notes, which he then took home and applied to his side hustle, an ad hoc candy shop run out of his basement.

It started small, producing your basic mints, hard candies, chocolate-covered raisins, candied nuts, and what have you, which he'd sell to nearby department stores.

But his dream?

Stuffed chocolates.

Indeed, it is a dream we all share.

One of his early inventions was the Lizzie Bar, named after his daughter, who remembers her dad getting up at 3 a.m. to crack and grate coconuts for his chocolate-covered caramels.

By 1926, Reese's various confectionery treats were making him enough money to quit Hershey's to focus on his passion for putting things into chocolate and smushing them together.

The company moved from Reese's basement to a nearby Pennsylvania factory, where there was no filling he wouldn't try.

Coconuts with caramel, coconuts with cream, coconuts with honeydew.

Big coconut guy, Reese was.

But to his credit, he also made peppermint creams, chocolate jets, nutties, nougats, peanuts, and raisin clusters to sell as a mixed assortment of chocolates.

To round out the grab bag, Reese reached for the closest ingredient he had yet to try.

Peanut butter, which he'd sandwich in paper cups layered between cooling slabs of Hershey's chocolates.

My man had no shame.

But the cups were so pretty that Reese ended up putting them in store windows to attract customers.

By 1935, they were popular enough to make as a stand-alone dessert.

Then the war broke out and, as we now know, Hershey had the rights to all the chocolate rations.

Reese was forced to rely exclusively on his peanut butter cups, as his other chocolates didn't have a Hershey's hookup.

But it proved fortunate, and Reese's peanut butter cups became the shining jewel of the family crown.

Reese died in 1956, leaving the company to his sons, who in turn sold 5% of their stock to Hershey's for $25 million.