For generations of Americans, the Hershey bar has been the taste of chocolate itself. It's in s'mores around the campfire and in lunch boxes and Halloween bags. But the bar's story begins with a man who quit school young and made his first fortune in a completely different candy.
Here's the short version. Milton Hershey built a successful caramel business, then fell for chocolate after seeing German machinery at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He worked out his own way to mass-produce milk chocolate, sold the caramel company in 1900, and that November began making the Hershey bar.
From Printer's Apprentice to Candy Man
Hershey had very little formal education and left school after the fourth grade. He was first apprenticed to a printer, but he soon lost that job. His mother then arranged for the 14-year-old to train under a candy maker in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he studied for four years.
In 1876, he moved to Philadelphia to start his first candy business. His big success came later with the Lancaster Caramel Company, founded in 1886.
A Chocolate Bar for Everyone
After buying chocolate-making machines, Hershey started by coating his caramels in chocolate. In 1894, he founded the Hershey Chocolate Company. By 1899 he had developed what became known as the Hershey process, which produced the first mass-produced chocolate in the United States.
The process uses fresh milk from local farms, and the exact method is still a trade secret. Experts suspect the milk is partly broken down in a way that creates butyric acid, also found in butter and Parmesan cheese. That gives Hershey's chocolate a slightly tangy taste that many Americans now think of as simply what chocolate tastes like.
The Town That Chocolate Built
The bar was a hit. With money from selling his caramel company, Hershey bought farmland near his birthplace, about 30 miles northwest of Lancaster. Houses, businesses, churches and roads grew up around his factory, and the area became the company town of Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Hershey kept adding to the lineup. Hershey's Kisses arrived in 1907, and the bar with almonds followed in 1908. He and his wife, Catherine, whom he married in 1898, had no children, and his giving included a boarding school originally created for local orphans.
A Close Call and a War Effort
In 1912, the Hersheys were booked on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. They canceled at the last minute because of business matters and sailed on the German liner SS Amerika instead. The cancellation is often wrongly blamed on his wife Kitty's poor health, but she had already been ill for years. A copy of the deposit check Hershey wrote for a first-class stateroom is kept in the archives of the Hershey Story Museum.
During World War II, Hershey made chocolate bars for American troops. The Army's Ration D Bar had to resist melting above 90 degrees and was deliberately made to taste just unpleasant enough that troops wouldn't develop cravings for it. A better-tasting Tropical Chocolate Bar followed. Between 1940 and 1945, more than three billion of these bars were produced and sent to soldiers around the world.
Today Hershey calls its classic bar the Great American Chocolate Bar. Next time you unwrap one, you're holding a little piece of a remarkable American story.
