The Hershey Company

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hershey Company, based in Hershey, Pennsylvania, produces over 70 million candies every day. Its chocolate is sold in 60 countries, and it ranks among the largest chocolate makers in the world. Yet the company is more than a name on a wrapper. It is a manufacturer that also makes baked goods, milkshakes and snacks. Its story raises some odd questions. How did a founder who struggled in business end up with one of the best-known brands in America? Who actually controls the company today? And what happened when its owners tried to sell it?

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• 2. Failures Before Chocolate

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  In 1873, Milton S. Hershey finished an apprenticeship with a confectioner in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He then opened a candy shop in Philadelphia, and it failed. A second venture in Chicago failed too, and so did a third in New York City. Hershey went back to Pennsylvania and in 1883 founded the Lancaster Caramel Company.

  The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago changed his direction. There he saw chocolate-making machines for the first time. In 1894 he founded the Hershey Chocolate Company as a subsidiary of his caramel business. Two years later he built a milk-processing plant so he could refine a recipe for milk chocolate candies. In 1899 he developed the Hershey process, which depends less on the quality of the milk than traditional methods do. In 1900 he began making the Hershey's Milk Chocolate bar.

  That same year, Hershey sold the caramel company for $1,000,000. Fresh milk in his caramels had worked well, but he wanted to concentrate on chocolate. When people questioned the move, he answered, "Caramels are just a fad, but chocolate is a permanent thing." Now he needed a place to build.

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• 3. The Town and the Kiss

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  The chocolate plant that Hershey began building in 1903 had no windows. The idea was that workers would not be distracted. The site was Derry Church, Pennsylvania, his own hometown, later renamed Hershey. Housing there was inexpensive for workers and their families. To lift morale, Hershey provided leisure activities, and these grew into what later became Hersheypark. The milk chocolate bars from the plant sold well, and the company grew quickly.

  In 1907, Hershey introduced a bite-sized, flat-bottomed, conical chocolate that he named Hershey's Kiss. Each piece was wrapped by hand in a square of aluminum foil. Machine wrapping arrived in 1921. It sped up production and added a small paper ribbon at the top, a sign that the candy was a genuine Hershey product.

  More products followed. Mr. Goodbar, which puts peanuts in milk chocolate, came in 1925, and Hershey's Syrup arrived in 1926. Semi-sweet chocolate chips, a mixture of milk and dark chocolate, appeared in 1928. The Krackel bar, with crisped rice, followed in 1938.

  Today, visitors can ride a simulated factory tour at Hershey's Chocolate World. That visitors center opened in 1973 and ended public tours of the Pennsylvania factory. California's factory tours stopped later, after the attacks of the 11th of September 2001, because of security concerns. In 1909, Hershey started a project that had nothing to do with candy.

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• 4. Orphans and Trustees

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  Milton Hershey and his wife could not have children of their own. In 1909, he founded the Hershey Industrial School for white orphaned boys. His wife died in 1915. Three years later, he placed around $90 million in trust for the boarding school, along with 40% of the company's common stock. The school first trained young men in trades and later shifted toward preparing them for college. Its buildings echo the candy business, and some street lights there take the shape of Hershey's Kisses. Hershey stayed involved in its operations until his death in 1945. In 1951 it was renamed the Milton Hershey School.

  The Hershey Trust Company has been the school's trustee since its founding and exercises the voting rights tied to that stock. Today the trust owns a minority stake in the company but holds the majority of the voting power.

  On the 25th of July 2002, the trust announced that it wanted to sell its controlling interest in what was then Hershey Foods Corporation. Hershey's stock jumped 25% in a single day, and over 19 million shares changed hands. Over the next 55 days, the media, Pennsylvania's attorney general and a senior judge of the Dauphin County Orphans' Court all criticized the plan. On the 17th of September 2002, seven trustees voted to sell for $12.5 billion to the Wrigley Company, now part of Mars, Incorporated. The sale was abandoned. Pennsylvania's attorney general and the judge removed those seven trustees, and ten of the 17 trustees were forced to resign. Four new members who lived locally were appointed. LeRoy S. Zimmerman, a former Pennsylvania attorney general, became chairman of the reconstituted board. He publicly committed that the school's trust would always keep its ownership of the company.

  A similar offer came in 2016, when Mondelez International made a $23 billion cash-and-stock bid. Hershey turned it down. An August 2016 attempt to sell to Mondelez was abandoned after objections from the trust. The 2002 effort had faced one more obstacle, hidden in a decades-old licensing agreement over two British candies.

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• 5. Strike and Side Ventures

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  A sit-down strike in 1937 ended in violence at the Hershey factory. A union backed by the Congress of Industrial Organizations was trying to organize the plant's workers. As strikers tried to leave, loyalist workers and local dairy farmers beat many of them. The effort failed. By 1940, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor had organized the workers under John Shearer. He became first president of Local Chapter Number 464 of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers' International Union. Local 464 still represents the Hershey workforce.

  From around 1938 to 1952, Milton Hershey also tried his hand at toilet soap. Demand for soap, shampoo, toothpaste and perfume had boomed after the Great Depression. Hershey opened a shop on the Atlantic City Boardwalk that sold soap scented with cocoa butter. Production came from Hershey Estates. The shop also sold keystone soap, tar soap and shaving soap. It was a success for several decades. By 1953, when it closed, the products were distributed from New York City to Baltimore.

  Shortly before World War II, Bruce Murrie struck a deal with Forrest Mars. Murrie was the son of William F.R. Murrie, long-time president of Hershey's. Together they planned hard, sugar-coated chocolates called M&M's, for Mars and Murrie. Murrie held a 20% interest, and the candy used Hershey chocolate during wartime rationing. In 1948, Mars bought out Murrie. Mars then became one of Hershey's main competitors. Another candy maker, whose peanut butter cups Hershey would eventually acquire, was already in business by 1923.

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• 6. Acquired Sweets

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  On the 2nd of July 1963, the H. B. Reese Candy Company merged with the Hershey Chocolate Corporation in a tax-free stock-for-stock deal. Harry Burnett Reese had invented Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. He died on the 16th of May 1956 in West Palm Beach, Florida, and left the company to his six sons. Six years after the merger, in 1969, the peanut butter cups became Hershey's top seller. By the 20th of September 2012, Reese's was the best-selling candy brand in the United States, with sales of $2.603 billion. Globally it ranked fourth, with $2.679 billion.

  The Reese family received 666,316 shares of Hershey common stock in the merger. By 2026, after 63 years of stock splits, those shares had become 16 million. They were valued at more than $4.4 billion and paid annual cash dividends of $92.9 million.

  In 1969, Hershey also received a perpetual license from the UK-based Rowntree's to make and sell Kit Kat and Rolo in the United States. Nestlé acquired Rowntree's in 1988 and still had to honor the agreement. A change-of-control clause would return the license to Nestlé if Hershey were ever sold. That clause became a sticking point in 2002, when Hershey failed to attract a serious buyer. Even Nestlé rejected the asking price, judging that the economics would not work.

  In 1988, Hershey also acquired the rights to make and distribute many Cadbury-branded products in the United States. Gum and mints were excluded and belong to Mondelez International. In 2015, Hershey sued a British importer to stop imports of British Cadbury chocolate. The move reportedly angered consumers.

  In 1977, Hershey bought Y&S Candies of nearby Lancaster, the maker of Twizzlers licorice. That company was founded in 1845, nearly half a century before Hershey's own.

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• 7. Snacks and Factories

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  In 1986, Hershey made a brief foray into cough drops by buying the Luden's brand. It sold the brand in 2001 to Pharmacia, now part of Pfizer, and Prestige Brands later acquired it. Hershey kept the Luden's 5th Avenue bar. In 1996, it bought the American operations of the Leaf Candy Company from Huhtamäki. In 1999, it divested its pasta group to equity partners, who formed the New World Pasta company, now part of Ebro Foods.

  In December 2004, Hershey acquired the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp. from The Shansby Group. In 2005 it bought the boutique chocolate makers Scharffen Berger of Berkeley, California, and Joseph Schmidt Confections of San Francisco. Dagoba Organic Chocolate of Ashland, Oregon followed in 2006. In December 2011, Hershey agreed to buy Brookside Foods of Abbotsford, British Columbia.

  Krave Jerky began in 2005, when Jon Sebastiani looked for a healthy source of energy while training for a marathon. Hershey bought the company in 2015 for $240 million. In 2020 it sold Krave to Sonoma Brands, a food industry incubator that Sebastiani had founded in 2016. In 2016, Hershey also bought barkTHINS for $290 million. In 2017 came Amplify Snack Brands of Austin, Texas, maker of SkinnyPop, in an all-cash deal worth about $1.6 billion. Pirate Brands followed in September 2018 for $420 million. These purchases marked Hershey's expansion beyond confectionery.

  In 2019, Hershey agreed to buy the protein bar maker One Brands for $397 million. That October it also released the Yuengling Hershey's Chocolate Porter, its first licensed beer partnership. In 2021, it bought Lily's for $425 million and announced a $1.2 billion deal for Dot's Homestyle Pretzels and its co-packer, Pretzel Inc. In 2023 it entered plant-based chocolate, including Plant Based Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. In July 2025, Kirk Tanner of The Wendy's Company was named to replace Michelle Buck as CEO after her retirement in August 2025.

  The first Hershey plant outside Pennsylvania opened on the 15th of June 1963 in Smiths Falls, Ontario, with Joseph Miller as manager. A third opened on the 22nd of May 1965 in Oakdale, California. In 2007, Hershey announced that both would close in 2008, replaced partly by a new facility in Monterrey, Mexico. Oakdale closed on the 1st of February 2008. A factory in São Roque, Brazil opened in August 2002, and a plant in Mandideep, India largely supplied Asia.

  On the 18th of September 2012, a new and expanded West Hershey plant opened, built on a budget of $300 million. In March 2018, Hershey broke ground on a $60 million expansion of its Kit Kat facility in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. The project was expected to add 111 jobs. In 2023, Hershey bought back the Smiths Falls plant for $53 million from the cannabis company Canopy Growth.

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• 8. Scrutiny and Disputes

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  In September 2006, ABC News reported that several Hershey products had been reformulated, with vegetable oil replacing cocoa butter as an emulsifier. The company said it did this to cut costs rather than raise prices or shrink the products. Some consumers complained about the taste. In company-sponsored blind tests, about half of consumers preferred the new versions. The new versions no longer met the Food and Drug Administration's definition of milk chocolate. Labels changed from "milk chocolate" and "made with chocolate" to "chocolate candy" and "chocolatey."

  In November 2006, the Smiths Falls plant in Ontario temporarily shut down. Several products were voluntarily recalled over concerns about Salmonella in soy lecithin on the production line. Most of the recalled products were believed never to have reached stores.

  In June 2006, Philadelphia city councilman Juan Ramos called on Hershey's to stop marketing Ice Breakers Pacs, a kind of mint. He said the packaging resembled a type used for illegal street drugs.

  In 2019, Hershey said it could not guarantee its chocolate was free from child slave labor, because it could trace only about 50% of its purchasing to the farm level. According to The Washington Post, a 2001 pledge to end such practices within four years had not been met. The deadline passed in 2005, and revised deadlines in 2008 and 2010 passed too. In 2021, eight former child slaves from Mali filed a class action alleging the company aided and abetted their enslavement on cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast. Nestlé, Cargill, Mars, Olam International, Barry Callebaut and Mondelez International were also named. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich dismissed the case in 2022. In December 2022, another lawsuit targeted lead and cadmium in the Special Dark bar and the 70% and 85% Lily bars. It rested on findings published by Consumer Reports.

  The Hershey Creamery Company, founded in the same year and the same county as Hershey's, has no affiliation with it. The two fought multiple trademark battles. In the mid-1990s they settled the latest ones out of court. The creamery agreed to put a disclaimer on its ice cream saying it is not affiliated with the Hershey Company.

  Outside the United States, Hershey's chocolate can taste unpleasant to people used to chocolate from other parts of the world. Controlled lipolysis in production leaves butyric acid in the chocolate, and that small chemical detail explains the divide.

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