New consumer data says Americans want texture, intensity, and novelty from what they eat at Halloween. Our own industry data says almost nobody in this business is set up to sell it to them.
That gap is the most useful thing in Mars’s 2026 Tricks, Treats and Trends Report, released this month. The report also puts a number on Summerween, confirms the season is stretching, and hands us the first generational data on where Halloween discovery actually happens. But start with the food, because that is where the money is sitting untouched.
The demand side
71% of US adults want sensory or textural experiences from treats. 58% want “extreme” flavors. 76% see sweet treats as a small daily pleasure. And 67% call seasonal moments like Halloween a “permission slip” to enjoy something special.
Actively seeking out seasonal flavors, colors, or shapes when snacking runs 74% among Gen Z, 72% Millennials, 61% Gen X, and 45% Baby Boomers.
Mars means candy. But that appetite does not stop at the candy aisle.
The supply side
From our reporting on Scarehouse Windsor’s immersive dinner, the industry numbers are stark:
- 65% of haunted attractions charge less than $30 for general admission (2024 Haunt Industry Report)
- Fewer than 10% incorporate food at all (2022 Haunt Industry Benchmark Survey)
- Only 3.9% cite food as a major revenue source (2024 Haunt Industry Report)
For comparison, regional theme park per-caps run $56.50 and destination parks $170.
Scarehouse Windsor’s package is $125 per guest. Co-owner Shawn Lippert broke it down for us: “It ends up being around $45 for the meal and $55 for your fast pass, which is our normal price.” But the margin is not the interesting part:
“We’re attracting people that would never be caught dead in a haunted house. They come for the dinner and end up loving the haunt as well.” — Shawn Lippert, Scarehouse Windsor
That is a customer acquisition channel, not a concession stand.
The same logic is showing up at scale this season. SCREAM-A-GEDDON just spent $2.5 million rebuilding its midway into a 50,000-square-foot environment with four new food trucks, fire pits with s’mores, and an expanded beer garden. None of it adds a scare. All of it extends dwell time. At Eastern State Penitentiary’s Halloween Nights, director Erin Davis described what that buys you:
“There are so many people that would come up to me and say, ‘We can’t come because it’s too scary.’ And now I get to say, ‘Well actually, there’s something for everyone.’ You don’t have to do the scary stuff. You can just be entertained and have drinks and food and enjoy your night in that way.”
In the wider attractions world, I wrote about this in May for Seasonal Entertainment Source after an IAAPA panel where operators were asked whether the F&B trend was sweet, savory, or experiential. All three answered experiential. Tommy Schatz-Thompson of Meow Wolf Grapevine described treating food and beverage “not as a secondary amenity, but a core element of the narrative for our entire site.”
One caution before anyone reformulates a menu. “Extreme flavor” is a candy category, and the haunt version is not a hotter hot sauce. The number that matters here is the 74% of Gen Z who seek out seasonal flavors, colors, or shapes. Specificity and theme, not shock. A themed, named, October-only item beats a generic one at a higher price. A hotter wing does not.
About that survey
The report is eleven slides summarizing a Morning Consult study fielded June 1 through 5, 2026, online, among 3,001 US adults 18+, weighted to be nationally representative, with a stated margin of error of 2 percent.
Three thousand people is a real sample. It is not a massive one, and it is not an industry study. Mars sells Halloween candy, and a report concluding that Halloween is bigger, longer, and more emotionally significant than you thought is a report that serves Mars. Read it that way.
Summerween, quantified at 57%
This is the finding I would put in front of a landlord.
57% of US adults say Halloween is no longer one day but a full season. 66% would buy their favorite Halloween candy year-round. And Mars puts numbers behind Summerween, a term it did not invent but has now measured.
The generational split is the useful part. 59% of Gen Z are aware of Summerween, and 30% already participate, nearly twice the general population. Awareness falls to 48% for Millennials, 26% for Gen X, and 10% for Baby Boomers. Gen Z’s stated Summerween interests: baking spooky treats (74%), hosting or attending themed parties (69%), decorating their homes (65%).
We have been documenting the operator-side version of this all summer without a consumer number attached. Mickey’s Not-So-Scary opens August 7, the earliest in its history. Halloween Horror Nights Orlando opens August 28, also its earliest ever. SCREAM-A-GEDDON opens August 29. On the retail side, Home Depot went live July 16, LEGO opened Mayor Manor pre-orders July 11, and At Home dropped 1,000-plus pieces July 25.
What Mars adds is that the audience says it wants this. That is a different argument than “our competitors did it.”
The two operators it most directly validates are ones we covered this month. ScareHouse is running Halloween Hangout as a month-long October takeover of a Pittsburgh outdoor venue, with no traditional haunted attraction in year one. And Universal Horror Unleashed is operating 365 days in Las Vegas, where senior director and general manager Kim Scott framed the advantage this way: “Where the parks have this finite amount of time, the interest that is coming to us is just phenomenal because we’re three sixty-five.”
I remain skeptical that a walk-through haunt is a year-round product, and I have written that at length. A 57% belief that Halloween is a season does not mean 57% of consumers will buy a haunted house ticket in February. But the season is defensible far outside October, and operators pushing into August and November are following demand rather than manufacturing it.
There is also an antecedent in our own archive. In 2019, Amy Hollaman, then at Terror Behind the Walls, told me: “When I was a kid, Halloween was one night, and it was sad when it was over. Now we can have Halloween for a bunch of nights! I love that this industry has taken a holiday from one night to 30.” That was seven years before Mars put 57% on it.
The trick-or-treat instinct, at 72%
72% of US adults agree certain candy brands feel like Halloween and the holiday would not be the same without them. 75% say a shared candy bowl builds community. 71% believe the candy they hand out says something about them as a host.
Strip out the brand framing and what remains is a finding about ritual and reciprocity. People want to give and receive treats, and they attach identity to it.
The events already serving that for adults are among the most reliably sold-out things we cover. The Spooky Swap Meet at Heritage Square Museum has sold out each day since its 2021 debut and now runs 65-plus vendors across three days, with guests of all ages trick-or-treating at seven Victorian-era homes decorated by professional and amateur haunt designers. Co-creator Claire Dunlap told me why back in 2021:
“We all need to be able to trick or treat, not just kids. It’s a little discriminatory that only children get to trick or treat.” — Claire Dunlap, Spooky Swap Meet
The same team built Cemetery Lane, a 13-stop trick-or-treat route through that same gated Victorian row, produced by Midsummer Scream co-founders David Markland and Claire Dunlap with Ian Momii and Sinister Pointe’s Jeff Schiefelbein. Neither event is a haunted house. Both sell the exchange itself.
Scott Swenson made the underlying argument on the same 2019 panel: “When we grew up, we wanted ways to catch that same spark in a bottle. That’s why adult-theme haunted attractions work incredibly well.”
If your event ends at the exit and the only thing a guest carries out is a photo, you are leaving the reciprocity instinct on the table. A candy hand-off at the exit costs almost nothing.
Where discovery happens, and where it doesn’t
53% of Gen Z use TikTok to discover Halloween or Halloween candy trends. 49% use YouTube. But when they buy, they buy in person: 43% at large retailers, 41% at supermarkets, only 18% online from a retailer’s site and 10% through TikTok Shop.
Two things worth flagging.
Discovery and purchase are separate venues. Gen Z finds it on TikTok and buys it at Target. Applied to haunts, your TikTok is a demand-generation channel, not a ticket-sales channel, and measuring it on last-click attribution will make it look like a failure. Josh Sumsion of Dead City Haunted House described the real mechanism to us in 2020 after a video hit three million views: “I wish we had a better way to track exactly who came in specifically through TikTok, but it was at least one group every 10 minutes or so would mention that they were here to see Jack Frost.”
YouTube at 49% is nearly tied with TikTok, and almost nobody in this industry is treating it that way. Vertical short-form absorbed the attention. That is a near-even split the report just handed us.
The retail case study worth studying is Home Depot’s $2.98 Halloween bucket went viral on TikTok last September: in-store only, impossible to buy online, now reselling on eBay at roughly triple retail. Discovery on social, purchase in the aisle, scarcity doing the rest.
What I would actually do with this
Four things, ordered by how cheaply you can act.
Put a treat in the guest’s hand on the way out. The 72% and 75% findings say the exchange itself carries weight. Lowest-cost item on the list.
Audit your food against “seasonal, textural, specific.” Not more food. One item that is unmistakably yours and unmistakably October. Fewer than 10% of haunts do food at all, so the bar for standing out is on the floor.
Split your social measurement. Stop asking whether TikTok sold tickets. Ask whether guests arrive already knowing your characters. And put something on YouTube, because half of Gen Z is there and your competitors are not.
Use the 57% when you negotiate. With a landlord, a city, a sponsor, or a partner venue, “57% of US adults believe Halloween is a full season” is a citable line from a nationally representative survey. That is a stronger argument for a longer permit window than anything this industry has previously been able to point at.
What the report doesn’t tell us
It is a survey of consumers about candy, not about attractions. Nobody was asked whether they attend haunted houses, what they pay, or how far they travel. The phrase “haunted attraction” does not appear in it. The 57% is about the holiday, not about your gate.
It is also a snapshot from a single five-day window in June, from a company with a commercial interest in the answers, at n=3,001. The margin of error is 2% overall but widens considerably on the generational cuts, where subsample sizes are not disclosed.
Use it as directional support for decisions you were already making. Do not build a season on it.
The 2026 Tricks, Treats and Trends Report was published by Mars in July 2026 in partnership with Morning Consult. Slides reproduced from the report.
