For the third year in a row, we’ve been the “Full-Sized Candy Bar House” in our neighborhood. We have always done rough inventory and after-the-fact tracking on Google Sheets, but that was mostly to guide our spending for next year. This year I wanted to try something a bit over-engineered, thus Halloween 2024.
Using Notion and a pair of linked databases I was able to build a Trick or Treat inventory. I then built a “Selections” database. Each time a kid took a piece of candy, I cut a new DB record with the type. This automatically kicked off inventory deductions on the Inventory database and regenerated the graphs. After adding in some metadata, we are able to slice and dice the data to get some interesting insights into which candy was taken and when (each record has a “created at” timestamp, so we can do temporal analysis as well).
If you’d like to dig into this data yourself, feel free:
Let’s dig into some of the more interesting data points.
Sour candy seems to be a big driver (~34% of all picks) with simpler chocolate-types following closely behind:
Its worth noting that both Airheads varieties were the first to be exhausted (aka: “sold out”). A treat containing peanuts or peanut butter seemed to lower its popularity. This follows along with other anecdotal data from previous years.
Simple chocolate-type candy tended to win out over “more complicated” varieties. Things like plain Hershey’s bars and Crunch bars were more popular than Snickers or Twix. This also follows trends from the previous two years.