Halloween means candy corn — and that means big business for Brach’s, its biggest maker. Meet the VP behind the candy.

• Matt Escalante is the new VP of Brach’s seasonal division, best known for its candy corn.
• The company knows its top treat is controversial — but it dominates a nearly $90 million market.
• Escalante says the treat is here to stay, like it or not.

If you’ve eaten candy corn sometime in the last century, there’s a good chance it came from Brach’s.

The confection giant is best known for cornering the candy corn market, churning out 28 million pounds of the candle-like candy each year and raking in $75 million of an $88.5 million candy corn market in 2022, according to data from the consumer research firm Circana.

That equates to more than 2 billion candy corn kernels, Business Insider previously reported, or enough to circle the moon nearly 13 times, the company says.

And while the candy corn market stays booming, the product itself — with its waxy texture, neon coloring, and saccharine aftertaste — is notoriously polarizing.

Best and worst lists regularly feature the stuff — and Brach’s has, in prior years, leaned into the debate with limited edition runs of seemingly made-for-social-media flavors like the viral 2021 Thanksgiving dinner variety featuring roasted turkey and stuffing flavored candies panned by one reviewer as “repellent.”

Enter Matt Escalante, the new vice president for Brach’s seasonal division, where Halloween is the candy Super Bowl. Hired in July after years working in the alcoholic beverage industry, Escalante is now in charge of being the go-to hype-man for the controversial candy corn.

Escalante stands by the treat — which, for the record, he does like, and prefers to eat one-by-one, rather than by the handful. But that doesn’t mean he and the company aren’t looking to find a new classic that more people actually want to eat, not just rant about on Twitter.

This year, the brand’s new fall-themed “Autumn Leaves” candy featured five nontraditional flavors: caramel apple, pumpkin spice, sweet maple, salted butterscotch, and spiced cider.

“We’re always looking for new flavor combinations, trying new on-trend things,” Escalante said. “Those are the ones we’ve got this year, but we’re thinking about new ones for next year and the year after.”

Brach’s is a branch of Ferrara Candy Company, a top player in non-chocolate candies, including brands like Jelly Belly, Trolli, Laffy Taffy, and Nerds — which The Wall Street Journal reported created the most recent industry juggernaut with its debut of Nerds Gummy Clusters in 2020, generating more than $500 million this year alone.

Brach’s hasn’t yet created its own version of the gummy cluster, but opportunity in the non-chocolate sector is growing, with consumer sales ballooning more than 48% from $7.5 billion in 2020 to nearly $12.5 billion so far this year, per Circana data.