Milton Hershey was a candy entrepreneur who founded the Hershey Chocolate Company and perfected the Hershey Bar. He started in printing and candy making, and built an industrial city with worker housing, schools, and entertainment facilities. He was also a philanthropist who donated his fortune to charity and promoted the welfare of his workers and their children.
Milton Snavey Hershey, known as MS Hershey or simply MS, was a candy entrepreneur in the United States best known as the founder of the Hershey Chocolate Company, which later transformed into the Hershey Foods Corporation. Many people around the world have eaten Hershey Corporation’s signature chocolate product, the Hershey Bar, and the formulation of this iconic food has changed little since Hershey’s perfected it in the late 1890s.
Hershey was born in 1857 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His education stopped in the fourth grade, at which point he was apprenticed as a printer. Milton Hershey quickly proved proficient in the printing business and studied under a candy maker, eventually starting his own candy company. His first venture failed, as did his second, but she eventually opened a successful candy company in his hometown, taking advantage of the large supply of dairy products in rural Pennsylvania for her Lancaster Caramels.
In 1890, Milton Hershey was introduced to milk chocolate and this filled him with inspiration, leading him to give up the caramel business and concentrate on chocolates. Milk chocolate of the time was a challenging food, often extremely grainy and bitter, and Milton Hershey worked to perfect a chocolate processing technique to achieve a very smooth and creamy bar of chocolate that was also designed to be accessible. Once Hershey Bars started hitting shelves, Milton Hershey was out and on the run.
One of Hershey’s most important contributions outside of the chocolate world was the building of Hershey, Pennsylvania, an industrial city complete with worker housing, public transportation, schools, and entertainment facilities such as theaters. The city was also home to the Hershey factory and the Hershey Industrial School, founded in 1909 by Milton Hershey and his wife Catherine for orphaned children. Milton Hershey School, as it is now known, continues to provide an excellent education to children who otherwise could not afford it.
While Milton Hershey is well known for his confectionery skills, thanks to the global corporation that now bears his name, he was also a philanthropist. He donated his fortune to charity and promoted the welfare of his workers and their children throughout his life. Milton Hershey was coy about his philanthropy, and no doubt would have been deeply embarrassed by the emotional tolls paid at his funeral in 1945, when members of the Hershey community turned out in force to mourn the death of their community leader and more great benefactor.
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