Box of Data

I woke up this morning to the joyful sound of my 3 kids sorting and trading their Halloween loot.  They had meticulously sorted their candy by type (even my 6 year-old), and gave me the idea for what you see here.  We talked about the various ways we could analyze this “data,” and the kids were pretty into it.  Of course, now that I’ve been banging away at Excel for a couple of hours, they’re nowhere to be found…

It is amazing to me that in a 2-2.5 hour timespan, they collected nearly 11 pounds of candy!  Equally impressive is the fact that each kid collected around .43 lbs. of candy per year of their age (I wanted to find a way to level the playing field but was surprised when it actually came out level).  There are some great findings here, including the fact that the old standby Tootsie Rolls ruled the pumpkin over newer, “cooler” candies like Skittles or Starbursts.  There is also the surprise (to me) that 40% of the brand candy they got was from Mars (over Hershey, Nestle, and Tootsie).

Check out the full analysis below (select the image to see it full size).

Halloween Aftermath: Candy Stats

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 6:32 pm and is filed under charts, personal data.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.