Halloween Food Has Gotten Seriously Weird This Year & These Are The Strangest

Somewhere out there is a person whose job is to approve a fizzing Cheeto. I think about that person a lot lately.

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Halloween food used to be simple. A chocolate bar shaped like a pumpkin. Gummy eyeballs, if you were lucky.

But 2026 has decided that Halloween food needs to be a whole lot weirder, and I’m starting to think the people coming up with these products have been left unsupervised for far too long with far too much sugar.

I’ve ranked four of this year’s strangest Halloween food releases from mildly questionable to completely unhinged. And I’m judging purely on the concept, not the taste. Some of the weirdest ones might be delicious. That’s what makes them so unsettling.

Cold Stone’s Boo Batter Ice Cream Taco

We’ll start with the one I’d eat right now, no questions asked.

Cold Stone has brought back its pitch-black Boo Batter Ice Cream for Halloween, and this year you can get it in an orange waffle taco dipped in chocolate and covered in spooky sprinkles. So it’s ice cream and a waffle cone, just rearranged into taco form. I’m not sure what was wrong with a regular ice cream cone, but I’m never going to complain about getting more waffle.

The black ice cream is the whole appeal. I’d order it purely because it looks cool, take about 15 photos of it, and then probably forget to eat it before it melted.

This one’s the least alarming thing here. A black taco full of ice cream is weird to look at, but there’s nothing particularly frightening about eating one. I’ve made worse decisions at 2AM.

Tropical Smoothie Cafe’s Fanta Phantom Smoothie

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with this drink, but I know I want one.

Tropical Smoothie Cafe’s first Halloween smoothie combines Fanta Orange-flavored syrup with mango, banana, nonfat yogurt, and cinnamon. So far, nothing too outrageous. But then someone decided it also needed purple vanilla-flavored popping boba, and suddenly we’ve got quite a lot happening in one cup.

I’m mostly intrigued by the Fanta and yogurt combination. I know orange and cream go together, but I’ve never considered putting Fanta-flavored syrup in a smoothie with yogurt. And then having little purple balls burst in my mouth between sips?

It looks like something I’d have begged my parents to buy me when I was eight. And now, as a functioning adult, I’d still buy it immediately. I can’t promise I’d understand what I was drinking, but I’d enjoy finding out.

Hidden Valley’s Spooky Ranch

Someone at Hidden Valley looked at a bottle of ranch dressing and thought, you know what this needs? Cocoa powder.

And somehow, everyone else agreed.

Spooky Ranch is Hidden Valley’s Original Ranch, turned completely black using fruit juice and cocoa powder. It also comes in a glow-in-the-dark bottle, just in case making the dressing black wasn’t screaming Halloween enough. The brand says it still tastes like Original Ranch, which is reassuring, because chocolate-flavored salad dressing is not something I particularly want to experience.

The glow-in-the-dark bottle, however, I love. I don’t think I’ll ever need to locate ranch dressing in complete darkness, but knowing I could is strangely comforting.

It’s available exclusively at Walmart for $3.97 while supplies last.

Picture someone putting this out at a Halloween party without telling anyone what it is. Imagine dipping a perfectly innocent chicken nugget into what looks like printer ink. I’d do it. I’d just need to see someone else go first.

Cheetos Sweet Phantom Heat Puffs

And then there’s Cheetos, which decided that making a snack taste strange wasn’t enough. It also needed to make your mouth feel strange.

Sweet Phantom Heat Puffs are cinnamon sugar-flavored, which is already confusing enough given that Cheetos’ entire thing is cheese dust and the half hour afterward when you can’t touch anything white. But the flavor isn’t even the strangest part. These puffs also deliver heat, tingling, and a subtle fizz, inspired by compounds found in Sichuan pepper.

Fizz.

In your mouth.

From a Cheeto.

I’ve eaten some questionable snacks in my life, but I’ve never once opened a bag hoping it would behave like Pop Rocks. Spicy, I understand. A snack that fizzes is an entirely different situation, and I have questions for whoever signed off on it.

I would, of course, eat them immediately. I’d start with one puff, wait to see what happened, and proceed from there.

Of everything on this list, these are the ones I can’t quite wrap my head around. Not necessarily because I think they’ll taste the best, but because I genuinely cannot imagine what a fizzy Cheeto feels like. Which, now that I think about it, is probably the most Halloween thing here. The whole holiday is about being a little scared of something and doing it anyway.

This year, that something is a Cheeto.