hersheys chocolate

The Hershey Company (NYSE: HSY), known until April 2004 as the Hershey Foods Corporation and commonly called Hershey's, is the largest chocolate manufacturer in North America. Its headquarters is 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 and other products are sold worldwide.Hershey's is one of the oldest chocolate companies in the United States, and an American icon for its chocolate bar. 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.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 US$24,000,000 in today's currency) and began to concentrate on chocolate manufacturing. In 1903, Hershey began construction of a chocolate plant in his hometown, Derry Church, Pennsylvania, which later came to be known as Hershey, Pennsylvania. The milk chocolate bars manufactured at this plant proved successful, and the company grew rapidly thereafter.While his company was successfully selling sweet chocolate products, Milton Hershey knew that a fortune lay in creating and selling milk chocolate products. Milton built a milk-processing plant in the year 1896, to be able to create and refine a recipe for milk chocolate candies. In 1899, three years later, he discovered the Hershey process.In 1907, Hershey introduced a new candy, small flat-bottomed conical-shaped pieces of chocolate that he named "Hershey's Kisses". Initially they were individually wrapped by hand in squares of foil, and the introduction of machine wrapping in 1921 simplified the process while adding the small paper ribbon to the top of the package to indicate that it was a genuine Hershey product.The product was trademarked three years later and went on to become one of the most successful and well-known products ever produced by the company. (In 2007, in a rare embrace of a commercial product on a first-class stamp, the USPS marked the one-hundredth anniversary of Hershey's by placing an image of one on its Love Stamp.) Other products introduced include Mr. Goodbar (1925), Hershey’s Syrup (1926), chocolate chips (1928), and the Krackel bar (1938).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, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers represents the Hershey workers, and although it calls itself the "Chocolate Workers" it has successfully organized workers in other local industries.In 1970, the Chairman of the Board of Directors, Daniel Jones was arrested on charges of embezzling funds and funneling profits to the North Vietnamese government. At a preliminary hearing, it came to light that many of the documents had been forged by another member of the board, Joseph Tresnep, who later admitted under oath that he wanted to take his position as Chairman. In 1971, the charges were formally dropped although the reputation of the company was badly damaged. Jones was later replaced by Roger W. Hershey as Chairman of the Board.In 2007, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, whose members include Hershey, Nestlé, and Archer Daniels Midland, began to lobby the FDA to change the legal definition of chocolate to let them substitute partially hydrogenated vegetable oils for cocoa butter as well as artificial sweeteners and milk substitutes. Currently, the FDA does not allow a product to be referred to as "chocolate" if the product contains any of these ingredients.In fall 2007, Hershey changed their milk chocolate recipe by adding lactose, milk fat, and the food additive PGPR.In December 2007, Philadelphia city councilman Juan Ramos called for Hershey's to stop marketing "Ice Breakers Pacs" due to the resemblance of the packaging to that used for street drugs.