Milton Hershey, every mention

Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired Dec 16, 2024 · 38 mentions

• ▶ 9:43 David Rosenthal Milton Hershey has started selling his Hershey's chocolate bars in Pennsylvania, which he started in 1900.
• ▶ 10:05 David Rosenthal Hershey had not yet figured out how to scale production.
• ▶ 10:14 Ben Gilbert Hershey had just figured out by the skin of his pants production and the recipe at all.
• ▶ 14:02 Ben Gilbert Only Europeans really are doing it, except for one American entrepreneur, Milton Hershey.
• ▶ 14:20 David Rosenthal So, Milton Hershey had been also a actually successful candy entrepreneur.
• ▶ 14:35 Ben Gilbert He sold it for a million dollars.
• ▶ 14:41 David Rosenthal He is among the most successful of this kind of generation of pre-chocolate candy entrepreneurs.
• ▶ 14:48 David Rosenthal Before he sold the business, though, in 1893, Hershey traveled to Chicago, where at the Columbian Exposition, which I didn't know this was the precursor to the World's Fair, he tries chocolate.
• ▶ 15:08 David Rosenthal There's a German company that is displaying chocolate and chocolate-making equipment, and Hershey is so taken by the rich complexity, deliciousness of chocolate that he buys from this German company all of the equipment on display there,…
• ▶ 16:50 David Rosenthal So you said milk chocolate, and I said Hershey at this point is not.
• ▶ 29:17 David Rosenthal So, back to Hershey.
• ▶ 29:19 David Rosenthal He, of course, learns about all of this as he's building his new chocolate company there in Pennsylvania, and
• ▶ 29:26 David Rosenthal He decides that he's gonna make milk chocolate too, except he's not a chemist.
• ▶ 29:31 David Rosenthal He doesn't employ any chemists.
• ▶ 29:33 David Rosenthal He basically has no idea what he's doing.
• ▶ 29:36 David Rosenthal And for years, he just experiments via trial and error to try and find a way to produce milk chocolate.
• ▶ 29:45 David Rosenthal He builds a huge new factory in what would become Hershey, Pennsylvania, like the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania.
• ▶ 29:51 David Rosenthal He's basically betting it all of, I am going to figure this out, and I am going to bring chocolate and milk chocolate to America at scale.
• ▶ 30:00 David Rosenthal Finally, after a couple years, he does hit on a method that works for producing milk chocolate.
• ▶ 31:09 Ben Gilbert After a series of laborious failures, Schmallebach, who was a scientist working with Hershey, seized on the initiative and tried a slow evaporation of nonfat milk over low heat.
• ▶ 31:34 Ben Gilbert Hershey was thrilled.
• ▶ 31:40 Ben Gilbert Now, there's a second view, which is that Hershey happened to acquire a large batch of milk powder from Europe, which has slightly soured by the time it crossed the Atlantic.
• ▶ 31:51 Ben Gilbert Reluctant to waste such a large amount, he used it to make chocolate and found that it sold well.
• ▶ 33:12 David Rosenthal So Hershey, he was crazy in believing in the potential for all this, but because he invested so much money, he set up the only scale chocolate production facility period in America.
• ▶ 33:27 David Rosenthal He was able to set this taste for the country, which basically locked him in as what chocolate was in America.
• ▶ 33:37 David Rosenthal And he's smart about this, too, from a business perspective.
• ▶ 33:42 David Rosenthal He intentionally sets the price at a nickel.
• ▶ 33:52 David Rosenthal He wants it to be ubiquitous, so he prices the bars at a nickel, and he pushes distribution everywhere.
• ▶ 34:06 David Rosenthal I mean, he basically invents the modern candy industry by doing this.
• ▶ 34:32 Ben Gilbert And so he decides,
• ▶ 34:34 Ben Gilbert I'm rich, I'm gonna go big immediately, and so he builds out this huge factory to start production before he's even finalized the formula, so it's really like a go big or go home strategy, where if it works, boom, mass production, mass…
• ▶ 35:04 David Rosenthal Right after Milton Hershey figures out milk chocolate and starts this production and is expanding distribution nationwide, World War I happens.
• ▶ 38:18 David Rosenthal So like, if you've ever wondered how the heck did Milton Hershey build a town and how did he become like Rockefellers or Carnegie's or Vanderbilt?
• ▶ 1:55:04 David Rosenthal William Murray, of course, being the president of Hershey and Milton Hershey's longtime number two president and COO type, but the guy who actually ran the company.
• ▶ 1:55:14 David Rosenthal Milton, by this point, is, like, very much focused on the town and the orphanage and the Hershey Trust and all that.
• ▶ 1:58:23 David Rosenthal So there's a reason, though, that he specifically goes to Murray to make this proposal, not to Milton Hershey.
• ▶ 2:40:02 David Rosenthal Well, when Milton introduced the Hershey chocolate bar in 1900, as we've talked about all episode, he priced it at a nickel, so that everybody, even in 1900, could afford it.
• ▶ 2:40:44 David Rosenthal It's Melton Hershey's legacy.