Here at Remedi, the biggest question of Halloween 2025 isn’t “Are ghosts real” but this one: How did EDI help a childhood tradition people outgrew by the time they hit puberty evolve into a party occasion that adults will spend a record 13.1 billion this year to celebrate?
Before we explain the connection, let’s peek into the vault of history at the origins of Halloween. It began as a Celtic harvest festival known as Samhain, a Gaelic word pronounced SAH-win.
The ancient Celts divided the year into a light half and a dark half. Samhain fell on October 31, and the Celts considered the date a sort of New Year’s Eve celebration that ushered in the dark half of the year. Samhain remained the status quo for hundreds of years until the eighth century, when Pope Gregory III moved All Hallows’ Eve from May to the last day in October.
The idea was to provide an alternative to the bonfires and costumes associated with Samhain, and usher in All Saints’ Day on November 1. Unfortunately for the Pope, the pagan aspects of the original Celtic celebration proved impossible to eradicate.
On the plus side for everyone else, All Hallows’ Eve would eventually become Halloween and grow to delight generations of children, adults, and, of course, retailers.
How Did Halloween Get Nearly as Popular (and Lucrative) as Christmas?
In the nineteenth century, waves of Irish and Scottish immigrants began to come to America, and they brought their traditions with them, including Halloween. Before long, Halloween began to look like the event we recognize today, with children in rural communities bobbing for apples and playing tricks.
Early pranks were harmless, mainly rambunctious boys removing gates from cattle pens while wearing masks. During the Great Depression, things took a darker turn.
Hard times saw adolescent gangs graduate from dismantling hay wagons and reassembling them on the roofs of farmhouses to breaking out windows in cars and schools.
Fearing the mayhem would explode into serious property damage with people getting hurt, neighbors and storekeepers began handing out treats to stop the tricks. While some may have considered the practice a form of bribery, it gave us the immortal phrase “Trick or Treat.”
To encourage more wholesome Halloween pursuits, schools, police departments, and other civic groups began to invent diversions for kids. Across America, organizations held town-wide parties, costume contests, and parades.
Two key product trends helped jumpstart Halloween into one of the second-largest retail events of the year. First was the concept of affordable, mass-produced costumes based on licensed pop culture characters, pioneered in 1937 by Ben and Nat Cooper, made in their Brooklyn, New York factory.
Second was store-bought candy, packaged for easy and affordable dispensing on Halloween, from Mars, Reese, and Hershey’s, among other brands. Today, Halloween drives billions of sales of candy and costumes, decorations, and cards.
Growth at that scale, coupled with affordable prices for all the sweet and spooky stuff consumers buy at this time of year, wouldn’t be possible without the invisible hand of modern EDI and complementary supply chain data exchange technologies such as APIs and MFTs.
How did EDI Fuel Halloween’s Rise?
EDI began in the 1960s as a way for companies to exchange business documents electronically and has since become the unseen force that keeps global trade running smoothly. Today, according to Brad Loetz, President of Remedi Consulting Group, EDI helps make the retail bonanza that is modern Halloween possible.
“That 12-foot skeleton walking his skeleton dog in your neighbor’s yard doesn’t show up in Home Depot at a price that people will pay without EDI,” Loetz said.
That millions of tons of decorations, candy, and costumes arrive at precisely the right stores at the right time in the correct quantities isn’t black magic.
Through documents like the 850 Purchase Order, 856 Advance Ship Notice, and 810 Invoice, manufacturers, carriers, and retailers coordinate production, shipping, and payments automatically.
“With the giant skeleton, you’ve got more than 25 behind the scenes EDI transactions throughout the production and delivery cycles that remove friction at every step,” Loetz said. “Fewer manual touches, faster customs clearance, and cleaner billing all keep the total landed cost lower.”
Embedded into global supply chains, EDI transactions automate ordering and shipping while eliminating manual data entry. While EDI helps retailers control costs for retailers, it helps consumers too.
Without the efficiencies EDI and related technologies like APIs and MFT deliver, a 12-foot animatronic skeleton with LCD eyes would scare buyers away with a price closer to $500 instead of under $300.
The Curse of Manual Processes
Despite EDI’s known benefits and wide availability of cost-effective solutions, many organizations continue to rely on manual processing, such as mailing checks and emailing POs and invoices by hand.
Such old-school practices slow payments and delivery. Worse, they lead to errors that incur fines and damage goodwill. All of which combine to make the organization look more lumbering than Victor Frankenstein’s creature.
On the bright side, as the story of Samhain’s transition from pagan ritual to retail juggernaut shows, there’s always room to grow with EDI.
Even organizations that use EDI for a small group of documents (invoices, POs, and ASNs) may be able to find further cost savings by expanding EDI’s range of transaction sets to other parts of the business.
How Remedi Can Relieve EDI Support Nightmares
Like electricity itself, EDI’s ubiquity and reliability have rendered it nearly invisible. That EDI can remain in the background is mostly a good thing. On the other hand, Finance and IT leaders often don’t realize the extent to which EDI drives operations at their companies until something breaks.
Which is why, as a recent article explains, it helps to think of EDI as “digital plumbing” that delivers everything from advance shipping notices to a better customer experience.
Our U.S.-based consulting team helps organizations modernize, migrate, or in some cases simply stabilize their EDI and B2B integration environments. And we offer flexible expertise with staffing solutions that range from full-time to fractional.
To learn more about how Remedi can help your organization address its EDI challenges and meet its growth targets, reach out here.
