12 Candies Adults Love Way More Than Kids Do

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Candy is, generally speaking, considered a young person's game. While there are your higher-end chocolates — Godivas and Ferrero Rochers and what have you — you tend to associate the Sour Patch Kids and Kit Kat Bars of the world with children lugging around bags of Halloween loot or being rewarded for good behavior on a trip to the hardware store. That's a reductive way of looking at the world, of course, and there are plenty of adults that love snacking on candy.

With that said, there are some treats that are more popular among grown-ups than kids. Maybe it's because they're so old-fashioned that they're rarely encountered outside of designated candy stores. Maybe it's because they have unusual ingredients or a strong flavor. Maybe they're just not that exciting. Whatever the case, us adults are more than happy to enjoy these while kids eat, uh, whatever candy kids eat.

Licorice is flavored with a root of the same name that lends it its characteristic sweet, herbal, lightly bitter flavor. (Black licorice, anyway — red licorice, like classic Twizzlers, just tastes like strawberry.) While adults can get behind this old-fashioned candy, kids prefer their sweets a little further removed from the medicine cabinet. If you give your kid a bag of jelly beans for Easter, don't be surprised if the black, licorice-flavored ones are all that remain after a day or two. Then there's Swedish salt licorice, a pungent candy that has perpetually divided American adults and kids alike.

Butterscotch is nothing more and nothing less than brown sugar and butter, combined and boiled until it forms a hard candy — it often also includes some salt and vanilla extract. The result is something sweet, mild, and, for children, not especially exciting. Maybe a palate trained on Sour Skittles finds something like butterscotch pedestrian — like an avant-garde jazzhead listening to Kenny G, who helped invent the Frappuccino apparently. Or maybe they don't have the patience for hard candy unless it has a strong flavor. Either way, more for us to keep in a cute little glass jar.

Chances are you've had chocolate bars with peanuts inside them, like Snickers or Reese's (provided you don't have an allergy, anyway.) But peanut brittle is basically just peanuts encased in a thick layer of brittle hardened sugar. You certainly can't accuse it of false advertising, but kids may not bite for something so simple. Or if they do bite, they're liable to get an unexpected visit from the Tooth Fairy. Still, you won't find us complaining about this sweet and salty treat, no matter how tough it is to chew.

This one has a pretty straightforward explanation for its relative unpopularity among children. As dark chocolate contains more cocoa than milk chocolate, it ends up having a bitter flavor — which makes it a no-go for most kids who have especially sensitive taste buds. (This also could be why many of them hated Brussels sprouts before selective vegetable breeding made them taste different.) Maybe they'll end up growing into it and acquiring a taste for the darker, more decadent stuff, or maybe they'll just stick with milk chocolate, as is their right.

Here's a fun fact: Although it contains both salt and water, those ingredients aren't what gives salt water taffy its name. That comes from its association with the seaside — go to any beach town in the Northeast, and you're likely to find a candy shop selling these sweet, chewy treats. Kids may or may not find them objectionable in their own right, but they might be confused as to why they don't look and taste like Laffy Taffy. We grown-ups, on the other hand, can take a bag home for ourselves — so long as we remember to floss.

Horehound, for those who don't know, is an herb in the mint family often used in folk medicine to treat colds, digestive issues, and other ailments. (It is one of the ingredients in Ricola lozenges.) Horehound drops likely originated as a way to make the herb more palatable, although your mileage may vary as to how successful this is. Fans say these hard candies taste a bit like root beer, while detractors say they are grossly bitter.

In "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," the White Witch famously convinced Edmund Pevensie to betray his siblings by offering him Turkish delight — a fact that has amazed countless children (and adults) who tried it after reading the book. The chewy, gelatinous candy — also known as lokum — often features dried fruits and nuts and is typically flavored with rosewater, which for the uninitiated makes it taste like it has been soaking in a bottle of their grandma's perfume. Young Edmund at least had the excuse of Blitz food rationing making him crave any kind of sugar, but many find the candy to be an acquired taste.

These are the candies you found in your grandmother's handbag and sneakily ate while she was taking a nap in her favorite armchair. Was it worth it? That very much depends. These stereotypical old-person candies are made of caramel and come in hard, soft, and chewy varieties. They tend to be comforting to grown-ups and, frankly, boring to children. But you know what else is boring to children? Steely Dan. So really, what do they know?

How old-fashioned are these candies, which are manufactured by the C. Howard Company (hence the name)? They made prominent appearances on "Mad Men," and even then they were old-fashioned for the mid-1960s setting. They're made of small, chewable squares, like mints, except instead of mints they taste like, well, violets — like, the flowers. As you can imagine, the youth aren't exactly lining up out the candy store door for a taste of these, but they certainly still inhabit a few handbags here and there.

Yes, we've figured out exactly what flavor Tootsie Rolls are; they're basically chocolate-flavored taffy. While kids love chocolate and they're not necessarily averse to chewy candies, something about this offering doesn't really call out from the Halloween candy bowl. Whether or not there's a bite of a potentially 100-year-old Tootsie Roll batch in the piece of candy you sample, these taste pretty old-school, if not unenjoyable. At least we still have Tootsie Pops, right?

These chocolate-covered mints are a longtime movie theater favorite (or operating theater favorite, in one memorable episode of "Seinfeld"), but that doesn't mean they're a huge hit among the youth. (Ironic, considering their name.) We're sure there are plenty of kids who love Junior Mints, just as we're sure there are plenty of kids who play shuffleboard and do the New York Times crossword puzzle. We're just saying we haven't met them yet.

In the United Kingdom, the name "Smarties" refers to small chocolates in a colorful candy shell, not unlike M&Ms. But here in the United States, small cellophane rolls of tablet candy that taste like vaguely tart bits of chalk are what comes to mind instead. Thinking back to past Halloweens, these were the first to get tossed aside in the post-trick-or-treat haul. Presumably our parents ate them, although we're frankly not sure why.