To place the candy in the bowl realistically, I set up a rigid body simulation using the MassFX Rigid Body modifier. I set the "Rigid Body Type" of the candy to dynamic, and that of the bowl to static. The "Mesh Type" of the bowl was set to composite, the bars inside were capsules, and each piece of candy was convex. I arranged the candy over the bowl (as shown on the left above), and ran the simulation. The image on the right shows the candy as it falls into the bottom of the bowl.

I had to experiment with various settings for a while, but eventually got the candy to fall in and settle in a way that I liked. Once I had that, I went in and moved some of the candies that had separated from the rest closer to them so that the silhouette of the overall shape would be more suitable for low poly. I deleted a few other stray pieces altogether.

When I was satisfied with the shape of candies as a whole, I attached them together and exported that object out of Max. I imported the resulting OBJ into ZBrush and used "Unified Skin" to convert the candies into a single mesh that I could then decimate (shown in the top two images above). The top left image shows the object just as it was imported from Max into ZBrush. To achieve the results in the top right image, I set the "Resolution" of the Unified Skin to 208 and the "Smooth" option to 26. The bottom image shows the result of the decimation I did afterward along with some vertex welding and slight manipulation I did once I brought the mesh back into Max in order to fine tune it.