Fall Food Trivia
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60 free Fall Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
57 free Fall Food trivia questions with answers. Autumn is the one season people can taste. This quiz covers the whole harvest table: the year Starbucks first poured a pumpkin spice latte and the year it finally added pumpkin, what candy corn was originally called, why cranberry growers flood their bogs, which state grows almost half of America's pumpkins, and how many buckets of maple sap it takes to make one of syrup. It also travels: mooncakes and the Mid-Autumn Festival, songpyeon at Chuseok, pan de muerto for Dia de Muertos, chestnuts on St Martin's Day, Oktoberfest's Munich-only beer rule and Britain's treacle-black bonfire toffee. Halloween candy, caramel apples, cider doughnuts, pecan pie and Thanksgiving turkeys round it out. Roughly a third of the questions are easy enough for a family game night; the rest reward people who read the back of the can. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic or official source, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each question.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In what year did Starbucks first sell the Pumpkin Spice Latte?
2003
Starbucks launched the Pumpkin Spice Latte in autumn 2003, after developing it that January; it reached every US store the following year and became the chain's best-selling seasonal drink.
Q 02In which year did Starbucks add real pumpkin to the Pumpkin Spice Latte?
2015
Starbucks reformulated the drink with real pumpkin purée in 2015, by which time it had sold more than 200 million Pumpkin Spice Lattes.
Q 03Which 1796 cookbook, the first written by an American, printed early pumpkin pie recipes?
American Cookery
Amelia Simmons' American Cookery, printed in Hartford in 1796, was the first cookbook by an American and included two 'pompkin' pudding recipes baked in a crust.
Q 04Libby's, the best-selling canned pumpkin brand, uses only which variety of squash?
Dickinson
Dickinson is a tan, oblong Cucurbita moschata that looks nothing like a Halloween pumpkin. Fresh pie bakers usually reach for small sugar pumpkins instead.
Q 05Roughly how much did the world's largest pumpkin pie, baked at Ohio's New Bremen Pumpkinfest in 2010, weigh?
3,699 lb
The New Bremen pie of September 2010 weighed 3,699 pounds and measured 20 feet across, earning the Guinness record for the world's largest pumpkin pie.
Q 06Candy corn was invented in the 1880s by George Renninger, an employee of which confectioner?
Wunderle
Wunderle of Philadelphia first produced Renninger's candy corn in 1888; the Goelitz Confectionery Company, now Jelly Belly, took it up in 1898.
Q 07What was candy corn's original name?
Chicken Feed
Goelitz sold it as Chicken Feed, in boxes with a rooster logo, pitching the yellow, orange and white kernels to a largely rural, farming America.
Q 08The National Confectioners Association designated which date National Candy Corn Day?
October 30
October 30, the day before Halloween, is National Candy Corn Day; as of 2016 US makers were producing about 35 million pounds, nearly 9 billion kernels, each year.
Q 09Dan Walker, credited with creating the caramel apple in the 1950s, sold for which company?
Kraft
Dan Walker, a Kraft Foods sales representative, devised the caramel apple in the 1950s as a use for leftover Halloween caramels, and the recipe went on Kraft caramel bags.
Q 10William W. Kolb invented the red candy apple in 1908 in his candy shop in which city?
Newark, New Jersey
Kolb, a Newark, New Jersey confectioner, dipped apples in red cinnamon candy he was testing for Christmas and put them in his shop window; they sold out at five cents each.
Q 11In Britain, toffee apples are eaten at Halloween and at which other autumn celebration?
Bonfire Night
Toffee apples are eaten on Bonfire Night, 5 November, as well as at Halloween; a hard toffee shell on a crisp apple suits cold outdoor bonfire gatherings.
Q 12Which ingredient gives the British sweet known as plot toffee its slightly bitter flavour?
Black treacle
Black treacle gives plot toffee its bitter edge; the sweet also goes by treacle toffee, Tom Trot and, in Scotland, claggum, and sells best in northern Britain.
Q 13Why does flooding cranberry beds with six to eight inches of water work as a 'wet harvest'?
The ripe berries float
Q 21Which Canadian province produces about 72% of the world's maple syrup?
Quebec
Quebec's producers hold a strategic reserve of syrup, and there is a black-market trade in the province's product.
Q 22Which state has long been the largest maple syrup producer in the United States?
Vermont
Vermont leads US production by a wide margin, setting a record of about 2.5 million gallons in 2022; its 2001 state quarter shows sap buckets on maple trees.
Q 23Roughly how many volumes of maple sap must be boiled down to make one volume of syrup?
20 to 50
It takes roughly 20 to 50 volumes of sap, about 40 on average, to make one volume of syrup; sap runs only when days thaw and nights freeze, so the season is short.
Ripe cranberries hold four air pockets, so they float when the bed is flooded; a water reel loosens them and the floating fruit is corralled into a corner and pumped out.
Q 14Which state is by far the largest cranberry producer in the United States?
Wisconsin
Wisconsin grows around 60% of the US cranberry crop, far ahead of any other state; the marshes around Warrens in central Wisconsin style themselves the Cranberry Capital.
Q 15Which grower-owned cooperative, founded in 1930, markets most of North America's cranberries?
Ocean Spray
Ocean Spray was formed in 1930 by three cranberry growers led by Marcus Urann, and the cooperative grew to handle around two-thirds of North America's cranberry crop.
Q 16Roughly what proportion of the cranberry crop is processed rather than sold fresh?
95%
About 95% of the cranberry crop is processed into juice, sauce and sweetened dried cranberries; only around 5% is sold fresh, mostly in the weeks before Thanksgiving.
Q 17Which state's legislature designated pecan pie its official state pie in 2013?
Texas
Texas, whose state tree is the pecan, made pecan pie its official state pie in 2013; the makers of Karo corn syrup did more than anyone to popularise the dish in the early 20th century.
Q 18Mooncakes are traditionally eaten during which Chinese celebration?
Mid-Autumn Festival
Mooncakes are the signature food of the Mid-Autumn Festival, held on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month; traditional ones bear an imprint of characters for longevity or harmony.
Q 19In a traditional lotus-seed mooncake, what does the salted duck egg yolk at the centre symbolise?
The full moon
The round salted duck egg yolk stands for the full moon of the festival night; premium lotus-seed mooncakes often hold two or even four yolks.
Q 20Legend says mooncakes hid messages that helped rebels overthrow which Mongol-led dynasty?
Yuan
Legend has Zhu Yuanzhang's rebels hiding the message 'kill the rulers on the fifteenth of the eighth month' in mooncakes to topple the Mongol Yuan dynasty; his Ming dynasty followed in 1368.
Q 24A 1925 Connecticut newspaper described members of which organisation eating 'Some-mores'?
The Girl Scouts
A 1925 Connecticut newspaper described Girl Scouts toasting 'Some-mores'; the recipe was printed in 1927 in the handbook Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts.
Q 25Which country holds its Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October?
Canada
Canada has marked Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October since a 1957 proclamation, some six weeks before the American holiday on the fourth Thursday of November.
Q 26Which vegetable was traditionally carved into Halloween lanterns in Ireland and Scotland before pumpkins?
Turnip
Turnips (and swedes) were hollowed out and carved into lanterns in Ireland and Scotland; the pumpkin, softer and far larger, took over quickly once the custom reached America.
Q 27In Ireland, small items such as a ring were traditionally hidden in which Halloween fruit bread?
Barmbrack
Barmbrack, the Irish Halloween fruit bread, hid a ring for whoever would marry next, along with items such as a pea or a coin; rings were also baked into colcannon.
Q 28Sharing medieval 'soul cakes' at Allhallowtide is a suggested origin of which Halloween practice?
Trick-or-treating
Souling, in which children and the poor went door to door for small spiced soul cakes in return for prayers for the dead, is a suggested ancestor of trick-or-treating.
Q 29In Portugal, roasted chestnuts are traditionally eaten on which saint's day in November?
St Martin's Day
St Martin's Day, 11 November, is Portugal's magusto, when families roast chestnuts over bonfires and drink new wine or jeropiga.
Q 30Within about 40 years, chestnut blight had killed roughly how many American chestnuts?
4 billion
Chestnut blight, first noticed in New York in 1904, killed an estimated 4 billion American chestnuts within about 40 years, wiping out a dominant hardwood of the eastern forests.