Planning an Easter Egg Hunt: How Much to Buy and What to Hide

Egg hunts go wrong in two predictable ways: not enough for the slowest child, and chocolate that has spent an hour melting in a flowerbed. Both are avoidable.

How much to buy

• Small foil eggs: 10–15 per child. A 1kg bag is roughly 150–200 eggs depending on the line, so 1kg covers about 12–15 children.
• Mixed hunt (foil eggs plus a few larger finds): 100–150g per child.
• Always buy about 20% over. Some will not be found, some will be found by the dog, and one child will always end up with three.

What survives being hidden

Foil-wrapped eggs are the right answer for anything outdoors. The foil keeps them clean in grass and soil, reflects some heat, and makes them easy to spot without being obvious. Individually wrapped sweets work for the same reason.

Do not hide unwrapped chocolate outdoors. Speckled eggs, mini eggs and anything sugar-shelled are for a bowl or a basket indoors — they pick up dirt, and a sugar shell in damp grass goes tacky within minutes.

The chocolate-in-spring problem

Easter falls exactly when British houses start warming up, and chocolate blooms — goes pale and chalky — when it warms and cools repeatedly. Keep it somewhere cool and dark until the morning, and hide it as late as you reasonably can. Bloomed chocolate is safe and fine for baking, it just looks poor. There is more on why in our guide to chocolate bloom.

Making it work for mixed ages

The perennial problem: a seven-year-old clears the garden before a three-year-old has started. Two fixes that work.

Colour-code by child. Each child hunts only their own colour of foil. Everyone finishes with the same amount and nobody is racing.

Zone by difficulty. Easy, visible spots at ground level for the youngest; genuinely hidden ones further out for older children, who are told where their zone starts.

Safety

Hard sweets and whole lollipops are not suitable for under-fours — see our guide on choking risk. Check allergies with parents beforehand, and if any child has a nut allergy, keep their finds separate from the start rather than sorting it out afterwards. Every product on this site lists its full allergen declaration.

Ordering in time

Order two weeks before Easter. Demand on egg lines is concentrated into about three weeks and popular lines do sell out, and sweets keep for months sealed so there is no advantage in leaving it late.

Which sweets survive being hidden

An egg hunt puts sweets somewhere they were never designed to be: on wet grass, in direct sun,
inside a plant pot, behind a radiator. What you hide matters as much as how much.

• Foil-wrapped chocolate is the traditional choice and the most fragile. In
  anything above about 18°C it softens, and it will bloom — the pale grey film covered in
  why chocolate turns white. Hide it
  last, in shade.
• Wrapped boiled sweets and toffees are close to indestructible and survive damp
  grass without complaint. If the hunt is outdoors and the weather is uncertain, weight the mix
  towards these.
• Unwrapped anything is a bad idea outdoors. Fizzy and sour coatings pull in
  moisture and go tacky within the hour, and everything picks up whatever it was hidden in.

Making it work for mixed ages

The universal problem with a family egg hunt is that the eight-year-olds clear the field before
the three-year-olds have found anything. Two things fix it:

• Colour-code by child. Each child hunts only their own colour of wrapper. It
  removes the race entirely and stops the count being contested afterwards.
• Zone by height. Everything below knee height is for the youngest, everything
  above shoulder height is for the oldest. Enforced by geometry rather than by arguing.

Counting up afterwards

Hide a known number and write it down. This sounds fussy and it is the difference between
finishing the hunt and finding a melted chocolate egg behind a plant pot in July. If you are
hiding a hundred pieces, count them into bowls of twenty first.

Expect not to find roughly one in twenty outdoors. Build that into the number you buy rather
than into the number of hiding places you use.

Buying for it

Buy by weight rather than by piece count, because a foil egg and a wrapped toffee are very
different things on the scales. The price per 100g on every listing makes the comparison easy, and
for a hunt of any size bulk and trade is considerably cheaper than retail
bags. The same arithmetic in more detail is in
how much pick and mix per person.

Shop Easter sweets,
chocolate and
wrapped sweets.