Reprint of November 1, 2016 New York Times ArticleOverwhelmed by candy?
As Halloween has escalated from a quaint local custom into an all-out sugar grab, a post-holiday tradition is gaining momentum: candy buybacks and donation campaigns to absorb the huge surpluses.
It started with pediatric dentists, who began paying for leftovers to ward off cavities and obesity. Then support-the-troops organizations got into the act, like Operation Gratitude and Soldiers’ Angels, which run national networks of donation spots where charitable youngsters can drop off their mountains of candy. The sweets are sometimes used in lieu of packing peanuts in gift boxes for faraway soldiers.
On Tuesday morning, schools across the country will be collecting candy to support a range of charities, sometimes with formidable restrictions, like a minimum donation of a gallon.
“We had no idea this would get so huge,” said Carolyn Blashek, founder of Operation Gratitude. Semitrailers full of candy will start arriving soon at the warehouse in Chatsworth, Calif., that the group uses as a staging ground.
“We have schools and churches and homeowners associations and restaurant chains and individual families — it’s been kind of endless,” Ms. Blashek said.
Every year, the sugar-fueled frenzy gets bigger — this year, Americans spent a record $2.7 billion on Halloween candy, the industry’s trade group estimates — and every year, mountains of chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, lollipops, jawbreakers and candy corn are left in its wake.
Now, the ever-growing effort at recycling mirrors the widening popularity of the holiday itself. And just as many people revile booze-fueled Halloween parties for grown-ups, so do some nutritionists and dentists wince at some of the places that donated candy winds up: food banks, soup kitchens and in the hands of poor children with other pressing needs.
Dentists and orthodontists were the first to hit on the post-Halloween demand to offload some candy. More than a decade ago, some started running buyback campaigns.
The street value of leftover candy runs around $1 a pound. That’s what Chris Kammer, a dentist in Wisconsin, offers at his office and recommends on HalloweenCandyBuyback.com, a site he started to help people find local candy donation spots.
Taylor Dempsey donated candy at a Kool Smiles dental office in Smyrna, Ga. In buybacks and donation campaigns, dentists, schools and support-the-troops organizations collect tons of surplus sweets. Credit: Dustin Chambers for The New York Times
Toys and prizes are also popular trading currency. At Kool Smiles, a nationwide dental chain based in Marietta, Ga., children can swap 25 pieces of wrapped candy for a stuffed animal, a monster dump truck or another plaything. That netted more than three tons of donated sweets last year.
But the trend has spread. Candy donation points are becoming ubiquitous at schools and other community gathering spots. In a nation battling obesity, heaps of leftover treats lying around, available for grazing, are a temptation many would rather avoid.
The thought of all those empty calories prompted Hannah Marshall, 16, to start a donation drive last year at her high school in New York.
“We wanted to somehow reduce the amount of Halloween candy students were eating,” said Hannah, who founded the fitness and health club at Trevor Day School in Manhattan. “We hoped people would donate, but we were blown away by how much we got.”
Hannah’s club collected 50 pounds of candy last year. It went to a local chapter of Ronald McDonald House, a support network for sick children, which gives the candy away to participants in its annual Fun Run charity fund-raiser. (The charity choice created “a bit of controversy,” Hannah acknowledged. “Some people thought it was going to cancer patients. We had to clarify.”)
Some dental professionals and health advocates say they view nearly every piece of donated candy as a victory against Halloween’s dark forces — weight gain, tooth decay and the chewy candies that wreak havoc on braces.
Bright Side Dental, a chain with 13 offices in the metro Detroit area and elsewhere, started gathering candy donations for military care packages seven years ago. Each year, the amount that comes in has nearly doubled, totaling more than 5,000 pounds last year.
“At first, we wondered if kids would give up their candy,” said Pam Lenning, a spokeswoman for Bright Side Dental. “It’s been the complete opposite. They love it, and they’re very willing to donate. It’s turned into this fun thing in the community.”
Just days after the loot lands in trick-or-treat bags, some of those slightly used snacks will already be in the castoff pile, destined for a second life at food banks and other charitable outlets.
International Security Assistance Force troops shared the contents of a care package from Operation Gratitude with children in Afghanistan. Operation Gratitude collects hundreds of thousands of pounds of donated Halloween candy each year. Credit: Operation Gratitude
Operation Gratitude, which started collecting leftover candy in 2007, is one of several support-the-troops organizations that bring military-level logistics to the task of gathering, sorting and redeploying literal tons of leftover candy.
For these groups, November becomes a logistical frenzy. Last year, five staff members and more than 10,000 local volunteers wrangled 760,000 pounds of candy at Operation Gratitude. Starting the day after Halloween, it arrives in boxes of all sizes from around the country and is dumped into giant storage bins for a few weeks, until it can be divvied up for distribution.
Until recently, the organization worked out of borrowed space at a local armory, which entailed storing all of its haul outdoors. “We had running battles with some very fat squirrels,” Ms. Blashek said grimly.
The group moved indoors this year, but other enemies remain — like Pixy Stix, the strawlike paper tubes filled with powdered candy. They are the only candy that Operation Gratitude asks people not to send. The wrappers frequently break, showering sticky sugar over everything in range.
The donated candy arrives in enormous quantities, but it all gets put to use, Ms. Blashek said. Volunteers use it like packing peanuts, tossing handfuls into care packages to cushion the other items, which include things like toiletries, knitted scarves and hats, DVDs, games and letters.
The soldiers who receive the packages eat some of the candy themselves, but often, it is also distributed to local children in the communities where troops are deployed. A Twix bar handed over to a costumed ghost or goblin in America could make its way to a child in Iraq.
“We found that people were using it to develop relationships,” Ms. Blashek said. “That’s when we started trying to get as much candy as we could.”
Of course, American youngsters (and their trick-or-treat-bag-raiding parents) are always a little more eager to donate certain snacks than others.
“We didn’t get much chocolate candy,” Ms. Marshall said of Trevor Day School’s contribution pile last year. “We saw a lot of Twizzlers.”
A version of this article appears in print on November 1, 2016, on page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: Where Halloween Candy Goes, the Morning After.
