Among the many, many, many things COVID-19 has upended is Halloween. For obvious reasons, the idea of interacting with hundreds of strangers crowded on your doorstep in a single night to personally hand out candy isn’t quite as sweet during a pandemic.
As such, we at The Spoon have wracked our brains to figure out how food tech might be able to rescue any Halloween encounters you might have with contactless delivery. Here are a few methods we’ve seen elsewhere online.
ALEXA POWERED CANDY CHUTE
One idea that seems to be gaining traction around the web is building a candy chute. Basically you get a six-foot piece of PVC pipe or whatever, and slide those fun-sized Snickers and more down to the trick or treaters. There isn’t much “tech” in this approach, and you still have to touch the candy bars to slide them down the chute. But those intrepid enough could zhuzhe it up a bit by building some kind of Alexa-enabled, Arduino-powered food dispenser at the top. Kiddos arrive and just have to yell “Alexa, gimme some candy!” and out it comes.
ROBOT DELIVERY
This one is a little more complex, but instead of going outside to personally meet trick-or-treaters, you could send a robot. Now, most people don’t have access to a personal Starship or Kiwibot, but the Keyes family over in Austin, TX have developed their own cool looking candy carrying robot (see below). If you don’t have that mechanical know-how, maybe strap a tray on top of a remote controlled car and drive it down to the curb?
CANDY BY DRONE
I’m thinking that for potential legal and regulatory reasons, I should say that you should definitely not try this at home. But over on done maker, DJI’s forum, you can see where someone did indeed deliver candy using a drone and some rope. There are definite navigational issues with this approach, with the rope swinging wildly (it’s no Google Wing), but perhaps the drone expert in your life could hack together a better solution. And then not use it because, again, we think that is a crazy idea.
Of course, if you’re looking to discourage trick or treaters, you could 3D print this double barrel candy corn launcher, because candy corn is gross.
Do you have any contactless candy dispensing hacks? Leave a comment and let us know!
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