By Ilena Peng, Bloomberg News

Halloween is shaping up to be a test for the chocolate industry, as high cocoa costs threaten to accelerate a consumer shift toward cheaper and trendier sweets such as sour gummies.

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For candy makers, Halloween remains crucial — the holiday made up nearly 18% of annual U.S. candy sales last year, second only to Christmas. But chocolate makers have been passing along costlier input prices to consumers, and that’s leaving an opening for rivals — who have already seen a shift toward non-chocolate treats — to grab more market share.

It’s the latest example of demand destruction as the chocolate industry is grappling with high prices amid a precarious supply outlook. While cocoa futures in New York have slumped about 50% from a record set in December, they’re still historically elevated. Chocolate makers are hoping nostalgia during the Halloween season can offset the broader shift away from their products.

“Chocolate is chocolate,” said David Branch, a sector manager at Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute. “We’re seeing less sales away from holidays and more sales during holidays. People are not buying it all the time, but when they want it, they want it.”

The problem is that, increasingly, they’re wanting it less often. Chocolate candy volumes dropped 6% in the 12 weeks ending Oct. 5, as the average price per pound jumped nearly 14%, according to data from consumer research firm Circana. Meanwhile, sales volumes for non-chocolate Halloween-themed candy — think Haribo sour gummy bats — rose 8.3% during the same period.

“I feel like it’s a weekly game between chocolate and non-chocolate, who’s winning that race,” said Sally Lyons Wyatt, Circana’s chief adviser for consumer goods and foodservice insights. Shoppers are still embracing chocolate despite the price increases, she said, but “it’s a jump ball almost between who’s going to get the shares right now.”

More than half of shoppers said they would prioritize gummy candies in their Halloween spending, and just shy of half said the same for hard candies, NielsenIQ researchers found.

Sugarfina, where gummies make up about 85% of its offerings, is selling out its product lines at a faster pace than last year, including a new tangerine-flavored “super sour” star that was gone by mid-October, according to Chief Executive Officer Scott LaPorta. The profitability of gummies has increased relative to chocolate as cocoa costs have risen, he added.

Haribo, best known for its gummy bears, is also seeing higher demand this year, said Hannah Curlee, the company’s seasonal brand manager. Higher chocolate prices have played a role, but gummies also provide a “seasonal creativity that chocolate can’t always match,” Curlee said.

Chocolate companies are fighting back with more promotions and seasonal offerings. They’re also taking action to keep prices down, using nuts and creams to cut back on costly cocoa ingredients.

Some of the biggest companies are stretching their broader portfolios. At Mondelez International Inc., owner of the Cadbury and Toblerone brands, gummies are the priority in the American market, said Chantal Butler, president of the company’s U.S. confectionery segment. Limited-time offerings like Halloween-themed Sour Patch Kids and Oreos “contribute significantly to the demand we see this time of year,” she added.

Still, the U.S. market in particular “is slower than we’ve seen in quite a while,” Mondelez CEO Dirk Van de Put said on an earnings call Tuesday. The company in response has launched more affordable products after its promotional strategy earlier this year “was not giving us the volume effect that we were hoping for,” he said.

Hershey Co. has new Halloween flavors and packaging in the gummy product lineup it launched last year in partnership with Shaquille O’Neal. That’s alongside ghost-shaped Twizzlers and “trickies” Jolly Rancher gummies with colors that don’t always line up with the expected flavors. Sugar-based sweet sales are stacking on top of chocolate sales, with few consumers explicitly choosing one over the other, according to a Hershey spokesperson.

Guittard Chocolate Co., a California-based chocolate company that sells largely to specialty candymakers, expects Halloween demand to be consistent with past years even as the industry works through cocoa supplies purchased earlier this year at much higher prices.

Some confectioners are coming out with new products to “take some of the pressure off” but consumers also require consistency in their favorite products — even at higher costs, said CEO Gary Guittard.

(With assistance from Kristina Peterson.)

©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Everyone knows someone — or maybe is that person — who shuts their eyes tight during the scary parts of a horror film and forces their friend to go first in the haunted house.

Others avoid scary movies and haunted houses altogether during Halloween. In a study published in August, a team at the University of Colorado Boulder studied how people’s brains respond to threats and fear.

Brain cells in the interpeduncular nucleus glow green in a mouse’s brain after a shadow appears on the ceiling. (Photo courtesy of CU Boulder)

The researchers found that a group of neurons, called the interpeduncular nucleus or IPN, plays a role in controlling how people respond and adapt to threats. IPN is a brain circuit located in the midbrain near the brain stem. The team discovered that this circuitry is highly activated the first time a person sees a potentially threatening situation, but as soon as individuals realize there is no threat anymore, the IPN shuts down.

“The first time that you see a very scary movie and there is a scene that you are not anticipating, your IPN is going to be very activated,” psychology and neuroscience professor Susanna Molas said. “But if you see this movie, you re-watch the movie over and over across the same week, your IPN is going to start learning that the scary scene is not as scary anymore, and the IPN will be less active across repeated exposures. It’s the same if you go to a haunted house.”

The more frightened a person is, the more the IPN should be engaged, Molas said. It’s also possible that people who love haunted houses and have a high tolerance for scary movies might have a less active IPN. There may also be a cognitive aspect of the person having more rationale when dealing with spooky situations.

“I think that there is an interplay between natural threat responses, but at the same time, more cognitive assessment,” Molas said. “So it’s possible that some people have a different balance of the natural threat response versus thinking whether this situation is actually creating a danger or a harm.”

For the study, the research team exposed mice to a projected shadow periodically over three days that mimics the approach of an aerial predator. The mice’s instinct was to run away. The team used advanced imaging techniques to measure the mice’s brain activity during the threat. Molas said she was surprised by how quickly the mice adapted their behavior and stopped running away from the shadow.

“I was struck to see that by three days, the animals already understood that the threat is not a danger anymore,” Molas said.

Disruptions in the IPN circuit could also play a role in mental health conditions, such as anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. About 19% of adults in the U.S. have an anxiety disorder, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. In a normal threat response, the IPN activity decreases once the brain identifies that there’s no real threat. With anxiety, the IPN remains active in anticipation of a negative effect happening in the future.

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It’s important to understand the causes and some of the brain regions involved with anxiety so scientists can develop better, more specialized treatments for it, Molas said.

“Anxiety is a very prevalent disorder in our society and the neural circuits behind that are still not completely understood,” she said. “There’s been huge progress, but there are some brain areas that, like the IPN, have not been considered for many decades.”

A month after the Minnesota Twins fired manager Rocco Baldelli following the conclusion of a disappointing 92-loss season, the team has finally settled on his replacement: Derek Shelton.

Shelton will become the 15th manager in club history, a source with knowledge of the hiring confirmed. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Shelton was the Twins’ bench coach for two seasons serving under both Paul Molitor and then Baldelli in 2018-19 before getting hired to manage the Pittsburgh Pirates for five-plus seasons. He was fired by Pittsburgh in May and replaced by bench coach Don Kelly.

President of baseball and business operations Derek Falvey is very familiar with Shelton, 55, who was finalist in the Twins’ last managerial search before Baldelli was hired. Good friends from their time with the Tampa Bay Rays, Shelton, a long-time major league coach, agreed to stay on Baldelli’s staff for his first season at the helm.

Following the 2019 season in which the Twins won 101 games, Shelton was hired by the Pirates, where he remained until the middle of this season. Shelton had a 306-440 (.410) record during his time in Pittsburgh. Working with the low-budget Pirates, Shelton lost 100 games in two consecutive seasons. The Pirates moved on from him after a 12-26 start to last season.

Shelton, who was a minor league catcher in the early 1990s, pivoted to coaching later that decade. He managed a New York Yankees’ affiliate before moving on to work for the then-Cleveland Indians, first in the minor leagues and then the majors.

He first became a major league coach in 2005 in Cleveland, serving as hitting coach through the 2009 season. He then moved to Tampa Bay and held the same role, overlapping on the coaching staff with Baldelli, before serving as the Blue Jays’ quality control coach for a season in 2017. From there, he joined the Twins for two seasons before getting his first chance to manage.

Other reported finalists for the job included James Rowson, who was the Twins’ hitting coach from 2017-19, former Seattle Mariners manager Scott Servais and Ryan Flaherty, the Chicago Cubs’ bench coach.

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By MATT BROWN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has restored a memorial to a Confederate general in Washington, D.C. that demonstrators took down during racial justice protests in the summer of 2020, part of a broader effort by the president to reshape the way the country’s history is told.

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The statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general and diplomat who later served on the Arkansas Supreme Court, is the only outdoor statue of a Confederate leader in the nation’s capital. It has been contentious since it was first placed in 1901.

Racial justice protestors in 2020 removed the statue from its pedestal and set it on fire on Juneteenth, a holiday among Black Americans that commemorates the end of slavery. The day was recognized as a federal holiday the following year.

The National Park Service in August announced plans to restore the statue in response to a pair of spring executive orders by President Donald Trump about the administration of the nation’s capital and how history is presented.

The administration has already ordered a review of the Smithsonian museums and exhibitions to align the institution’s content with President Donald Trump’s interpretation of American history. The park service is under orders to review interpretive materials at all its historical properties and remove or alter descriptions that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” or otherwise sully the American story.

The statue becomes a political flashpoint

The statue has returned to Judiciary Square, a downtown complex that includes an array of federal and municipal courthouses and the D.C. police headquarters.

Conservatives had seized on the monument’s removal as an example of destructive excess and vandalism by protestors during the summer of 2020. Some rightwing activists praised the statue’s restoration following Trump’s order.

But critics of the monument argue that the public placement of Pike’s statue endorses his views and actions rather than simply commemorates them.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city’s lone non-voting elected official in Congress, called the statue’s restoration a “morally objectionable move” in a statement this week. She has proposed legislation in Congress that would permanently remove the memorial.

“Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not remain in parks or other locations that imply honor. Pike represents the worst of the Confederacy and has no claim to be memorialized in the nation’s capital,” Norton said.

Trump criticized the statue’s removal in 2020 following its removal by protestors, calling it a “beautiful piece of art.”

The removal of memorials to Confederate figures was a key goal of the wave of activism that followed the 2015 killing of nine Black church parishioners by a white supremacist gunman who idolized Confederate symbols. More than 480 symbols and statues were removed nationwide since then, according to the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Whose Heritage?” campaign.

After the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a nationwide reckoning on racial injustice, the SPLC recorded more than 160 removals of Confederate symbols in that year alone.

Pike statue does not mention his service to the Confederacy

Pike was a slave owner, white supremacist and poet who served as an Army general and diplomat for the Confederate states despite being born and raised in Massachusetts.

During the Civil War, he led Confederate troops in Arkansas and negotiated with slave-owning Native American tribes. Pike received amnesty from President Andrew Johnson in 1865, after which he was accused by former opponents of being involved in the Ku Klux Klan. He moved to Washington in 1870.

Pike’s statue was part of a wave of Confederate statues that were erected across the country, largely in former Confederate states, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The statues, often funded and established by Confederate heritage groups, were part of the Southern “Lost Cause” movement that sought to romanticize the Confederacy and downplay the role of slavery as a reason for why states seceded from the Union.

The statue was authorized by Congress in 1898 and then erected in 1901. It was proposed by the Freemasons, who wanted to honor him for his leadership in the society. Union veterans strongly opposed the statue but relented after being assured that Pike would be displayed in civilian clothing. The plaque recognizes Pike as an author, poet and philanthropist but does not mention his military service to the Confederacy.

Northern state lawmakers and Union veterans were outraged by the trend at the time of Pike’s statue being erected and countered the movement by erecting statues of Union generals and lawmakers in cities across the country’s northeast and Midwest.

For instance, the Washington, D.C. neighborhoods of Dupont Circle, Logan Circle and Thomas Circle near the square where Pike’s statue now stands are all named after Union generals.