When Halloween really started becoming a thing in the mid 20th century, candy companies jumped on it and started considering which of their year-round offerings they could insist had always been Halloween treats. Candy corn was a natural fit, having become associated with autumn, so they slapped it into teeny bags and earmarked all their candy corn marketing dollars for October (or, now, July).
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The 1950 Candy Corn Poisoning Scandal
This backfired pretty much immediately in 1950, when kids ate so much candy corn all at the same time that they got sick, and not just the expected tummy ache. It turned out the orange dye used in candy corn, as well as a lot of other foods, at the time was toxic in such large doses, so they realized they probably shouldn’t have been using food coloring made out of coal tar to begin with and outlawed it.
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The 2021 Ransomware Attack
Candy corn didn’t really make big headlines again until 2021, when Brach’s fell victim to a ransomware attack that interrupted candy corn production right at the start of the Halloween season. It was great fodder for jokes about the people rising up against candy corn, but it was more likely just plain old cyber crime, and the involvement of candy corn was incidental.