Fruit and crisps sit alongside the familiar sweets in Deliveroo’s Halloween ranking, while its ordering figures point to a busy late-afternoon shop.
Deliveroo’s order data puts Haribo first and strawberries second in its predicted Halloween top 10 for 2026. The fruit deserves a closer look, and so does the 4pm panic.
Every Halloween has a moment when someone checks the cupboard and finds the emergency sweets have gone. They were eaten at some point in the past fortnight, usually by the person now checking the cupboard. The doorbell hasn’t rung yet, but school has finished, and somewhere a small skeleton is already putting its shoes on.
That moment has a measurable timestamp. Deliveroo looked at grocery orders delivered across the UK on Halloween 2025. By 3.03 pm, half of the day’s Halloween essentials (sweets, chocolate, pumpkins and other Halloween items) had been ordered. The busiest hour was 4 pm to 5 pm, and 32% came after 5 pm, once trick-or-treating was under way.
Looking ahead to this year’s Saturday Halloween, Suzy McClintock, Deliveroo’s VP Consumer, expects demand to begin earlier and build through the day as customers prepare for parties as well as trick-or-treaters.
McClintock said: ‘Halloween on a Saturday changes everything. Last year the rush started when the school bell went; this year we expect it to start earlier and build throughout the day with parties as well as trick-or-treaters making the most of the moment.
Whether it’s a carving pumpkin, snacks for the party, a sharing bag of sweets or even a costume, Deliveroo can bring everything you need from your local shops to your doorstep in minutes.”
The Most Popular Halloween Treats, and the Fruit Among Them
Sustain Health · Halloween 2026
What the UK is ordering
for Halloween
Deliveroo’s ten most popular Halloween orders in the UK this year — and it’s not all pick ’n’ mix.
Most ordered
Haribo Sharing Bag
The classic sharing bag still rules spooky season, topping the UK list for 2026.
What’s in the basket
- 5 sweets & chocolate
- 2 crisps
- 2 fresh produce
- 1 nuts & dried fruit
The rest of the top 10
- 2StrawberriesFresh
- 3Cadbury Dairy MilkSweets
- 4Walkers crispsCrisps
- 5SwizzelsSweets
- 6PumpkinsFresh
- 7Nuts and raisinsNuts
- 8MaoamSweets
- 9DoritosCrisps
- 10MaltesersSweets
The Sustain Health take
Confectionery still makes up half the list, but strawberries landing at No. 2 — ahead of Dairy Milk — is the standout. Add pumpkins and nuts and raisins, and three of the ten most popular Halloween orders are whole foods.
Source: Deliveroo UK, Halloween 2026 order data.
Haribo at the top surprises nobody. A sharing bag tips neatly into a bowl by the door, and the contents survive being grabbed by a gloved hand. Strawberries in second place, ahead of Dairy Milk, are rather more interesting, and so are nuts and raisins at seventh.
Before anyone declares a nutritional awakening on Britain’s doorsteps, look at how the list was built. Deliveroo counted item quantities per 1,000 grocery orders delivered on 31 October 2025, grouped them by brand or product, then adjusted for growth since 2024 and for this year’s Saturday to produce a prediction. So it measures what turned up in Halloween-day grocery orders, which isn’t the same as what was handed out at the door. Some of those strawberries will have gone on a party platter. Others will have gone into Sunday’s breakfast.
The grouping matters too. “Nuts and raisins” covers almonds, cashews, walnuts, peanuts and other nuts, plus raisins, sultanas and dried fruit. That’s most of an aisle competing against a single brand such as Maoam. Walkers and Doritos are likewise counted across every flavour and bag size. This is simply how category data works, but it means seventh place reflects a broad basket rather than a nation swapping fun-size bars for almonds.
Even so, fresh fruit made the list. Halloween shopping is not all sugar. For anyone hosting, that’s useful: a bowl of strawberries next to the Haribo is less eccentric than it might feel.
The Last-Minute Pumpkin
Carving pumpkins were the biggest riser in Deliveroo’s data. Units per grocery order rose about 26% between 24 and 31 October 2025, compared with the same week in 2024, and two in five of that week’s pumpkins were ordered on 30 and 31 October.
Nottingham left it latest, with 53% of its pumpkins ordered in those final two days. Edinburgh (45%), London (44%), Cardiff (44%) and Bournemouth (42%) followed.
The appeal of delivery is obvious to anyone who has carried a large pumpkin home on foot. It is heavy, it is round, and nobody has yet thought to give it handles.
The Organised, the Late and the Snackers
On the day itself, York had the highest share of essentials ordered after 5pm, at 37%, with Cambridge and London on 35% each. These figures cover cities with at least 450 essentials ordered that day. Glasgow, Sheffield and Leicester led for sweets ordered between 3pm and 5pm.
At the other end of the scale, Bournemouth, Cardiff and Aberdeen did most of their sweet and chocolate buying early, in the 24 to 29 October lead-up. Bournemouth and Cardiff also appear among the late pumpkin buyers. So the sweets were sorted by midweek and the pumpkin was left until the last possible moment. It is a very recognisable order of priorities.
Other cities went for the store cupboard. London, Cambridge, Aberdeen, Oxford and Edinburgh ordered the most nuts, dried fruit and raisins per 1,000 grocery orders on 30 and 31 October 2025. In Oxford, nut units per order rose 46% on Halloween compared with the six days before.
Edinburgh, Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge and York topped the table for what Deliveroo calls “picky bits”: houmous, dips, sausage rolls and pickled onion Monster Munch. Edinburgh’s picky bits rose 18% on Halloween compared with the previous six days. Putting Monster Munch in the same category as houmous is, at the very least, a generous definition of a dip.
The Verdict
These figures come from one company’s delivered grocery orders. They tell you what Deliveroo customers ordered and when, not what Britain ate or handed out. City rankings are per 1,000 orders and only include cities with enough volume, so London can’t top every list on size alone.
Within those limits, the patterns ring true: a sugary list with fruit near the top, pumpkins bought late, and plenty of households doing the important shopping after the school run.
A Saturday Halloween gives everyone a full day of daylight to get organised. Whether anyone uses it is another matter. The emergency sweets, after all, were also bought with plenty of time to spare.
