Background:

Many types of candy come in pre-wrapped miniature single-serving (or “fun sized”) pieces, especially as Halloween candy.

The Issue:

For many people, it can be difficult to avoid eating an entire bag / bowl / other-type-of-container of candy.

Proposal:

We can create a candy dispenser that works as follows: first, the user fills the dispenser. Then, whenever the user wants a piece of candy, they turn a timer past a certain minimum amount of time and wait it to expire, at which point a piece of candy is dispensed.

One might expect that “timed gumball machine” or “timer-based gumball dispenser” would reveal that this is a product that already exists, but somehow it does not!

Conclusion:

While someone must have created a product like this already, it doesn’t seem like anything similar is commercially available. An almost identical timer-based product exists for pets (https://www.google.com/search?q=automatic+pet+feeder), but it isn’t quite suitable for this use case, since it would dispense candy on a schedule even when the user wasn’t requesting it—and the whole point of this is to reduce candy consumption, not to pressure the user into eating an ever-accumulating pile of chocolates.

PROS: Should make it easier to avoid eating, say, an entire bowl of M&Ms.

CONS: Any developers of this product might end up in the crosshairs of Big Chocolate. Maybe that’s why this isn’t commercially available already!