Hip hop hooray! Easter is almost here! And so are baskets filled with fluorescent fake grass and candy. Lots and lots of candy. In 2021, Americans likely spent $3 billion on Easter candy, making it the most lucrative holiday for confectioners. Here are some other sweet stats about the spring celebration:
🐰 90% of Americans will share Easter chocolate and candy
🐰 87% of parents will give Easter baskets to their kids
🐰 91% of Easter baskets will include chocolate
🐰 81% of parents will steal candy from their kids’ baskets
You know who else loves candy? Cavity-causing bacteria. But that doesn’t mean you have to skip the sweets. You can still indulge in moderation as long as you brush and use cleansing, textured floss afterward.
With that cavity-fighting caveat in mind, let’s dive down the sugarcoated rabbit hole and explore the amazing confectionery feats of four of the most popular Easter treats.
Chocolate Bunnies
🐰 A recent study titled “Seasonality of Auricular [Ear] Amputations in Rabbits” found that 59% of Americans bite off the ears first, 4% start with the feet, another 4% go for the tail, and 33% of ravenous eaters will chomp anywhere.
🐰 Nearly 15 feet tall and weighing in at a massive 9,360 pounds (4.68 tons), the world’s largest chocolate bunny took eight days to build and only two hours to devour. The giant rabbit was created in 2017 for the annual Chocofest in Gramado, Brazil.
🐰 The price tag on the planet’s poshest chocolate lapin? A whopping $49,000. The blinged-out bun bun sported 1.70-carat diamond peepers and carried three gilded eggs. (P.S. For the cost of that 11-pound bunny, you could nab 174,222 yards of Cocofloss.)
🐰 Why are chocolate hares often disappointingly hollow? It’s actually a small concession to your precious chompers. If they were solid, it would be like biting into a brick. “You’d be breaking teeth,” Mark Schlott, vice-president of operations at R.M. Palmer (one of the first and largest manufacturers of hollow chocolate bunnies) told Smithsonian magazine.
Chocolate Eggs
🐣 The first chocolate eggs started popping up in France and Germany in the early 1800s, but people have been dyeing eggs to celebrate spring for thousands of years. Eggs colored a joyful red were particularly popular gifts in 16th- and 17th-century England.
🐣 The tallest chocolate egg ever laid measured 34 feet high, weighed 15,873 pounds, and had a 64-foot waistband. Which begs the question, how big was that cocoa chicken?
🐣 If the 500 million Cadbury Creme Eggs that are made each year were stacked on top of each other, the tasty tower would be 10 times taller than Mount Everest.
A survey by Cadbury revealed that 53% of people bite off the top, lick out the cream, then eat the chocolate, 20% bite straight through, and 6% scoop out the creme with their fingers first. Sticky!
🐣 Cadbury held its first “Bunny Tryouts” last year, and Henri, an 18-month-old English bulldog, beat out more than 4,000 other pet competitors to land the role of Cadbury’s new “Clucking Bunny.” A goat, a horse, a bearded dragon, and a llama named Conswala were among the other 19 semi-finalists.
Peeps
🐥 People love Peeps. The sugary chicks have been the reigning non-chocolate Easter confection for more than 20 years.
🐥 Around 5.5 million Peeps are made every day. That’s 2 billion a year — enough to circle the Earth twice.
🐥 It used to take 27 hours to create one Peep. That was back in 1953, when Peeps were handmade with a pastry tube and took more than a day to set. Today, state-of-the-art machines can produce perfect, ready-to-eat Peeps in minutes.
🐥 At the World Peeps Eating Championship in 2017, legendary competitive eater Matt Stonie gobbled 255 Peeps in five minutes, beating the world record he set the previous year.
🐥 In 1999, a pair of “Peeps Investigators” at Emory University discovered that the squishy sweets are surprisingly strong. Tap water, boiling water, acetone, sulfuric acid, and sodium hydroxide were all no match for the yellow bird. Only after an hour in Phenol, a lethal solvent, did the Peep succumb, leaving behind only a pair of brown wax eyes.
Jelly Beans
😋 More than 16 billion jelly beans are made in the U.S. each year for Easter, enough to fill a plastic egg nine stories high and 60 feet wide.
😋 The birth of a jelly bean takes 7 to 21 days and involves many sugar-soaked steps, including steam baths, sugar sprays, and a final shiny layer of hot syrup and wax.
😋 In the 1910s and 1920s, “jellybean” was slang for a nattily dressed, but otherwise kind of worthless, ladies man.
😋 When he was running for governor of California, Ronald Reagan replaced his pipe-smoking addiction with a major jones for jelly beans. As president, he had a standing order with Jelly Belly Candy Company for 720 one-pound bags per month (306,070 beans), to be doled out to the White House and other federal buildings. A special jar holder was installed on Air Force One to prevent his chewy treats from spilling during turbulence. And he sent Jelly Bellys into space in 1983 as a sweet surprise for the astronauts.
😋 According to the Candy Store’s 2019 survey results, the most popular jelly bean flavor in America is buttered popcorn followed by cinnamon and black licorice.
✨ Remember: Don’t forget to floss and brush after the holiday sugar rush. Super-cleansing Cocofloss will make sure your eggs aren’t the only things that are white and bright. ✨
