For most American kids, it wouldn’t be Halloween without trick-or-treating for candy. However, that wasn’t always the way it was.

When the custom of trick-or-treating started in the 1930s and early 1940s, children were given everything from homemade cookies and pieces of cake to fruit, nuts, coins and toys. In the 1950s, candy makers began to promote products for Halloween by putting up many posters in the streets. Kids were interested in them and bought a lot. So the candy makers made billions. As time went by, candy became an affordable and convenient offering.

By the 1970s, the wrapped(有包装的) factory­made candy was thought to be the only acceptable thing to hand out to all the little kids. A key reason for this was safety. Parents feared that other people might do something bad with handmade candy.

Today, when it comes to Halloween candy, a number of the most popular brands(品牌) are still classics. For example, the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate bar was produced in 1900 and was first sold seven years later. In the early 1900s, the company founder Milton Hershey even built an entire town, Hershey, Pennsylvania, around his chocolate factory.

Another popular Halloween candy, the Kit Kat bar, was first sold in England in 1935 as a Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp. Since 1988, the brand has been owned by Nestle, one of the largest food makers in the world.

And of course, no Halloween would be complete without candy corn, which was invented in the 1880s by George Renninger of the Wunderle Candy Company of Philadelphia. Other companies went on to produce their own versions(版本) of the tricolor candy corn, none longer than the Goelitz Confectionery Company, which has been doing so since 1898.