There was a time that Candy School Fundraisers were the most common way to raise money. But that’s changed over the past few years. There’s a few reasons why it is not as common. Some are valid and some not so much.

The biggest reason there’s been a reduction in candy school fundraisers has been school districts that determined youth obesity was caused in part because kids were eating too much candy. Part of their solution was to ban one of the easiest ways to raise money. After all candy fundraising offers products that are extremely affordable and well received. And even though only a small portion of candy sold during the fundraiser was actually consumed by the students many districts felt compelled to appear to be taking action.

Another reason that candy school fundraisers started shrinking was that the candy bars being sold were also shrinking. At first it was rather startling. Hershey fundraising candy was offering bars that were sold more inexpensively in vending machines. That is no longer the case. Hershey got smart and created a larger candy bar for their fundraising products line and it corrected the dilemna of discount stores selling candy cheaper than the school could purchase candy for.

Finally lots of schools chose to avoid candy fundraisers because they had to commit to a certain amount of candy. Pricing was based on the number of cases a school purchased so the tendency sometimes was to overbuy. The mistake was not intentional. It was just hard to accurately predict sales. And if you got a better price for buying a few more cases many people tended to error on the high side. But that meant that there was unsold candy which would seriously eat into profits.

Interestingly, though, now that there are few candy school fundraisers being held it might make more sense now to hold one. After all there is not the competition there once was and the fact of the matter is that most people eat candy bars now and then.