How Has Hershey’s Production Changed Over Time? Nia Evangeloulis Rough Draft

Milton Hershey went a long way during his life, and, unlike the advice they give in his Kit-Kat commercials, he never took a break in fulfilling his dream of being a candy man. He made his first million before he turned 25, and thought little of the many millions he made afterwards. What he is best known for is his generosity and his ability to mass produce what is now one of the world’s most recognizable names: his own.

This was made possible by the example that his parents gave him. His mother provided him with a strong work ethic and his father, even after many failed inventions that never made the millions that he had hoped for, taught him never to gave up on his dreams. He was lucky to realize that he loved making candy after his second job at the age of 13. Everyone in the town would ask him for his delicious creations. But his real success came when he went to Denver to learn the art of caramel making. He took a simple horse and cart around the town after 6 months of lessons, and sold the caramels for 1 cent each. Luck shone on him one day when a British man asked him to send his caramels overseas to England. The caramels were such a huge success that they made

Milton Hershey a millionaire at 25 years old. The secret to his delicious caramels was fresh milk and slow heating the sugar, which made a nice, creamy consistency.

Eventually, he sold his caramel company for more than a million dollars. This allowed him to start planning his real dream of a huge factory in his home town of Dairy

Township, Pennsylvania.

People said he was crazy, but his real master plan was not just to build a factory in a field, but to build a town around it. The factory, built in 1903, was the size of two football fields and over 600 people were employed there. In this town, Hershey built houses that were each unique, which was more expensive in the long run, but he wanted the best for his workers. Hershey thought of his town as his family and treated them that way. Also, he installed indoor plumbing and had large lawns for each house, which was not very common at the time throughout the United States. But, he still didn’t have a recipe to mass produce a chocolate.

Luck again was on his side, when he happened to visit a World’s Fair. He smelled chocolate as he strolled through the fair’s amazing exhibits and followed his nose to a

German chocolate maker. After trying one of his chocolates, he completely fell in love with it. So, with enough money on hand, he bought the entire exhibit and the chocolate making machine and h ad it shipped to his house. He made the chocolates in the exact same way in his factory and then sold them out of a buggy throughout the state. Then he made a great decision: he stopped producing so many candies and focused on this new one. This was a good idea because now the company could buy the same ingredients and every one of his workers would be focused on milk chocolates and his new creation, the

Hershey’s kiss. The end result was that he could make more chocolates at a cheaper price. The public went crazy over them because this was the first time the average man could eat chocolates on a regular basis. Previously, chocolates could only be afforded by the rich because of the price.

Although Hershey made lots of candies, he still hadn’t perfected the European art of chocolate making. But he wasn’t willing to go to Europe and learn it. Instead, he chose the harder way: rediscovering it for himself by hiring chemists, who all failed. The one person who succeeded in making the right combination of milk, cocoa and sugar witouth burning it, was one of his own workers. Hershey handed him a $100 bill on the spot and thanked him for not being a PhD. The reason Hershey had had so much trouble making the chocolate is because milk and chocolate are natural enemies, like water and oil, they don’t mix well. His worker had found a way to break down the fat in the milk and combine it with sugar at the right moment of boiling. Everyone loved it! In 1900, he made the Hershey bar and in 1903 he made the first Hershey kiss and two million more dollars.

He started selling his candy almost everywhere in the U.S. Previously candy was only sold at pharmacies, now he was targeting candy stores, department stores, newsstands and groceries. People say that Hershey is the one to blame for all the aisles of candy staring you in the face as you check out of any store. His marketing was, in fact, so successful that he reached production of over 100,000 pounds of chocolate a day in a matter of a few years. By 1910, he was a millionaire many times over and now had over

1,500 people working in his factory. Even though he made millions, he often said he didn’t care about profit. Hershey often said, “I have more money than I know what to do with.” Instead, he was interested, until the day he died, in constant experimentation with different blends of chocolate.

Hershey spent many hours rolling up his sleeves in the factory trying to create new things. He did it not for the money, but for the joy of creating. When he realized that he had a lot of left over cocoa butter in his factory, he decided to try to make it into soap.

Even after losing thousands of dollars in creating a soap factory, advertizing the product and producing it, they were a total failure. The soap not only didn’t make a lather because the fat had not completely melted in the detergent, but the bar also smelled terrible even though they tried to add many different scents. In addition, Hershey wrapped his soap bar in brown paper so it would have name recognition, but he didn’t realize that it looked so much like a chocolate bar that children were trying to eat it instead of bathe with it. Worst of all, he couldn’t even give the bars away for free because when he tried handing out the soap bars for free at games, the soap was thrown at referees when they made a call the crowds didn’t like. Hershey experimented until the day he died, not affected by his failures or successes. He even donated a lot of his money to his own town by building schools, a hospital, stores, playgrounds, and many more things to make his workers happy in their new middle class status. When he died, he donated most of his money to the boy’s orphanage that he founded, showing that he did not care for profit, but for creation.

Although Hershey’s owns different companies, Hershey’s chocolates are still their biggest money maker. They own 46 percent of the U.S. chocolate market. Half of the candy consumed during the year, is, in fact, bought during the big holidays of

Christmas, Halloween and Easter. Mars and Hershey’s are the lead producers of chocolate, owning two-thirds of the candy market in the U.S. There is a down side to the

Hershey company’s success. That is, the more Hershey grows, the more it gets rid of smaller chocolate businesses. Even Palmer’s chocolate, that sells chocolate Easter bunnies, is being squeezed out by big companies like Hershey’s.

One can only wonder how Hershey would feel about this. In addition to them elbowing out all the little chocolate makers like he used to be, the company is also refusing to sign the Free Trade Agreement, which would allow workers from other countries to be paid a fair amount of money for their job. While Hershey lived, he helped his workers live a decent life, with housing, indoor plumbing, playgrounds and many other luxuries. He would probably be very upset seeing how children are being forced to work day and night for little or no pay; how some of them are kidnapped from their homes and made slaves in the cocoa farms of Africa; and how their parents get a few dollars a day for picking the cocoa that the world consumes just so we can save a few dollars at the register. In addition, this causes people in the U.S. to lose their jobs because the company has fired many workers here and chosen these cheaper farms out of the country to save money. Conclusion

Milton Hershey