Trick-or-Treat Bureau: Raisins Least Popular Treat for 47th Consecutive Year

PORT ASTER — The Municipal Trick-or-Treat Data Bureau confirmed Thursday what children have known for generations: the raisin box is once again the least popular Halloween treat, finishing dead last in the Bureau’s annual desirability rankings for the 47th consecutive year.

“Forty-seven years,” said Dr. Lena Okafor, the Bureau’s Chief Treat Statistician, slowly. “The raisin has been statistically evaluated every Halloween since 1979, and it has never — not once — cracked the top forty. It has been outperformed by the toothbrush. It has been outperformed by the religious pamphlet. In 2016 it was outperformed by a single unsalted peanut distributed in a year when peanuts were, briefly, controversial.”

The Bureau’s methodology is rigorous: 11,000 porch surveys, doorbell-camera trade analysis, and the annual “bucket audit,” in which researchers examine children’s candy hauls at 9 p.m. and record which items have been “pre-sorted into the give-to-little-sibling pile.” Raisins, Okafor reported, are pre-sorted at a rate of 96 percent — “the remaining four percent represents children who have not yet learned.”

Perhaps most damning is the Bureau’s “porch-face” metric, which codes children’s facial expressions upon receiving each treat. The full-size candy bar scores a 9.4 out of 10 on the Delight Index. The raisin box scores a 1.2 — “and the 1.2,” Okafor noted, “comes entirely from children under four, who will eat anything, including, in one documented case, the box.”

The Bureau’s report includes a historical appendix tracing the raisin’s decline, from its “respectable mid-tier” status in the early 1970s — “an era of lower expectations,” the report notes — through the Great Raisin Collapse of 1988, when a single neighborhood’s coordinated raisin distribution “broke something in the collective child psyche from which it has never recovered.”

Defenders of the raisin — the report identifies eleven, all adults, all “suspiciously enthusiastic about fiber” — argue the treat is nutritious, non-melting, and “teaches children that not all rewards are sweet.” Okafor was unmoved. “Halloween is not a lesson,” she said. “Halloween is the one night a year when the entire economy of childhood runs on pure sugar joy. The raisin is a lecture in a box.”

The Bureau’s formal recommendation, unchanged since 1979: “Distribute raisins only if you are prepared to be remembered, specifically and unfavorably, by every child on your street.” The report notes that one household — the same house every year, researchers believe — continues to distribute raisins “out of what can only be described as tradition, or possibly spite.” That household’s porch-face score, Okafor confirmed, “is the lowest ever recorded, and we have measured the toothbrush house.”