DUNMORE — The Regional Buffet Authority’s first annual Leftover Candy Summit ended in chaos Saturday after 900 pounds of chocolate — the entire inventory assembled for the event — vanished over the course of the afternoon in what officials are calling “an unprecedented consumption event” and what attendees are calling “lunch.”
“Nine hundred pounds,” said Authority Chair Ron Deverell, staring at the empty supervised serving station. “We had tongs. We had signage. We had a portion guidance placard recommending ‘a modest handful.’ At 2 p.m. the station was full. At 5 p.m. it was — and I want the record to show I am choosing my words — a bowl containing three butterscotch discs and a single, abandoned Almond Joy.”
The summit — convened to address the region’s post-Halloween candy surplus through “supervised communal redistribution” — drew 600 attendees, including the county’s Leftover Candy Economic Stabilization Task Force, the Municipal Squirrel Liaison (“observing, not participating,” Patricia Venn stressed), and what Deverell described as “a bus.”
“A bus arrived at 3:15,” Deverell said. “We do not know whose bus it was. Forty people got off the bus. Forty people walked directly to the chocolate station. The bus left at 3:40. We are still trying to determine whether the bus was part of the summit or simply — and I hate this phrase — opportunistic.”
Authority inspectors reviewing the event’s security footage identified several “consumption anomalies,” including a man who made eleven trips to the station “with the steady pace of a professional,” a child who filled an entire pillowcase “while maintaining eye contact with the inspector, which was bold,” and the previously reported “hoodie” — the honor-bowl bandit from the Trick-or-Treat Data Bureau’s annual report — who, Deverell confirmed, “is real, is known to us, and is banned from all future Authority events.”
Despite the inventory loss, Deverell declared the summit “a success of redistribution.” “Our mission was to move surplus candy from centralized storage into the community,” he said. “By that metric, we achieved 99.7 percent efficiency in under three hours. The tongs were aspirational. The community was actual.”
The task force’s Commissioner Gerald Mims — whose strategic candy reserve supplied the summit’s inventory — was philosophical. “We tracked every ounce going in,” Mims said. “We tracked zero ounces going out. Somewhere between the tongs and the bus, the free market happened. I have decided to record the entire 900 pounds as ‘community stimulus’ and move on.”
The Authority will host next year’s summit with what Deverell called “enhanced portion architecture,” including pre-bagged servings, a ticket system, and “a strict no-bus policy, which we should not have needed to articulate but now must.”
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