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Fill your basket with some data on America’s favorite jelly beans

What does taste in jelly beans say about a state? 🤔 We don't know, but here's a map.

Delaware loves cinnamon. (Screenshot via CandyStore.com)

In anticipation of Easter, an online candy store aptly named CandyStore.com took a decade of jelly bean sales data and conducted online and social media surveys to find out America’s favorite jelly bean flavor by state.

No doubt, this kind of sales and customer data breakdown is important if you’re in the candy business. For the rest of us, it’s just fun to play with the interactive map:

Source: 10+ years bulk candy sales data from CandyStore.com.

(Sales and survey data is weighted at 90/10 respectively, with recent sales data favored over older data.)

Delaware’s favorite flavor is cinnamon, a favorite shared by Nevada (which Delaware is related to via Capriotti’s), Kansas (which, fun fact, has a ghost town called Delaware City) and Wyoming (notable for being 44 times bigger than Delaware with roughly half the population).

The national favorite is buttered popcorn (Editor’s note: This can’t be right), which means Jelly Belly brand jelly beans are the most popular, seeing as they’re the only brand that makes that flavor. Second is black licorice (Editor’s note: SMDH), the favorite of states including Kentucky, Minnesota and Alaska, suggesting that some still prefer old-fashioned jelly bean brands like Brach’s (or, at least, the old-fashioned flavors offered by Jelly Belly). Third is cinnamon, which is also an old-fashioned flavor found in nostalgically medicinal-tasting “jelly bird eggs” mixes, along with less popular flavors like clove and wintergreen, as well as Jelly Belly’s trendier Sizzlin’ Cinnamon.

The most popular fruit flavor is watermelon (Editor’s note: Now we’re talkin’!), somehow beating out cherry. It’s probably aesthetics — watermelon Jelly Bellys have that deep green shell with pink on the inside. Fun fact: Blueberry, popular in Pennsylvania, was created by Jelly Belly in 1980 for the Ronald Reagan inauguration (he was known for chewing on licorice jelly beans to stave off tobacco cravings). They already had red (cherry) and white (coconut) beans.

By the way, I still haven’t figured out what flavor old-fashioned white (not spiced) jelly beans are. I mean the old ones that were definitely not coconut or pineapple or mint. Plain? Wax? Turnip?

Anyway. Data! Data visualization! Content marketing!

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