The Hershey Company
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The Hershey Company (Template:Nyse), formerly Hershey Foods Corporation (name changed in April 2005), commonly called Hershey's, is the world's largest chocolate company. The headquarters are located in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a town permeated by the aroma of cocoa on some days and home to Hershey’s Chocolate World. It was founded by Milton S. Hershey in 1894 as the Hershey Chocolate Company, a subsidiary of his Lancaster Caramel Company. Hershey's candies are sold worldwide.
Hershey's is one of the oldest chocolate companies in the United States, and an American icon for its chocolate bar. Today, The Hershey Company owns many other candy companies and is also affiliated with Hershey Entertainment and Resorts Company, which runs Hersheypark, a chocolate-themed amusement park, the Hershey Bears hockey team, HersheyPark Stadium, and the Giant Center.
Hershey's chocolate candies are widely popular in the United States and many other countries in the world.
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History of Hershey's
After completing an apprenticeship to a confectioner in 1876, Milton Snavely Hershey founded a candy shop in Philadelphia which failed six years later. After trying unsuccessfully to manufacture candy in New York, Hershey returned to Pennsylvania, where he founded the Lancaster Caramel Company, whose use of fresh milk in caramels proved successful. In 1900, Hershey sold his caramel company for $1,000,000 (about $22,000,000 in today's currency) and began to concentrate on chocolate manufacturing.
In 1903, Hershey began construction of a chocolate plant in what became Hershey, Pennsylvania. The milk chocolate bars manufactured at this plant proved successful, and the company grew rapidly thereafter.
In 1907 Hershey introduced the small flat bottomed conical shaped pieces of chocolate which Mr. Hershey would name "Hershey's Kisses". While initially they were individually wrapped by hand with squares of foil, in 1921 machine wrapping was introduced and added the small paper ribbon to the top of the package indicating that it was a genuine Hershey product. The product was trademarked 3 years later and went on to become one of the most successful and well known products ever produced by the company. Other products introduced include MR. Goodbar (1925), Hershey’s Syrup (1926), chocolate chips (1928), and the Krackel bar (1938).
During the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations sent the veteran organizer Miles Sweeney to unionize the chocolate workers. The workers held a sitdown strike, occupying the plant for several days. Hershey refused to negotiate with the union, and, apparently with Milton Hershey's approval, local dairy farmers forcibly ejected the workers from the plant, though with only minor injuries. Hershey later tried to form a company union.
In 1940, over two years after the defeat of the CIO union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor successfully organized Hershey's workers under the leadership of John Shearer, who became the local's first president. Currently, Local 464 of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers represents the Hershey workers, and although it calls itself the "Chocolate Workers," it has successfully organized local workers in other industries.
The first plant outside of Hershey, Pa was opened on June 15, 1963 in Smiths Falls, Ontario, Canada. Another plant was opened on May 22, 1965 in Oakdale, California.
Chocolate
Image:Hersheys Chocolate.jpg Today, most of Hershey's chocolate products are not made using traditional European recipes, but instead use less cocoa and a higher incorporation of sugar. Though still highly popular, they are nowhere near as popular in Europe, or other countries with a strong chocolate tradition. This is due mainly to the very fact that less cocoa is used compared with European brands, and Europeans mainly favour those with the higher cocoa content. It is also notable that while Hershey's products are sold in a number of European countries, they do not dominate any of the European markets, or even come close.
In 1988, Hershey's acquired the rights to manufacture and distribute many Cadbury-branded products in the United States. The Cadbury creme eggs sold in the U.S., however, are imported by Hershey directly from Cadbury in the U.K.
In July 2005, Hershey's announced that they would be acquiring Berkeley, California-based boutique chocolate-maker Scharffen Berger.
Philanthropic giving
The Hershey Company is owned mostly by the Milton Hershey Trust Fund, which maintains the Milton Hershey School and Milton Hershey Medical Center, among other projects. Milton Hershey was famous for his generosity. Hersheypark was initially founded as an amusement park for his workers' children.
Since 1999, The Hershey Company has sponsored the Elizabethtown College Honors Program. The endowment promotes higher education at Elizabethtown College.
Helen Caldicott and the Hershey Company
Anti-nuclear power activist Helen Caldicott has alleged that the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island contaminated the countryside near Hershey with strontium-90 which cows then used for grazing. She claims the cows would have passed the contamination on in their milk to the milk chocolate produced in the nearby factory.
However, the TMI incident released no Sr-90. Only trace amounts of iodine-131 - with a half-life of only eight days - were released during the incident. The remaining radioactive products were noble gases, which do not accumulate in living tissue and therefore would not have entered the food chain.
See also
External links
References
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