Business Lessons Sealed With a Kiss

My “baby” sister is only two and one-half years younger than me, and she lives just one hour from central Pennsylvania. So, when it was decided I’d be going to the summer meeting of the American Architectural Manufacturers Association (AAMA); there seemed a plan to be hatched. We’d both arrive at the Hotel Hershey in Pennsylvania late Saturday, have dinner and do a little sightseeing Sunday morning before she headed back to Delaware when the meeting started.

After all, why would AAMA have a meeting in the middle of an amusement-park, tourist-attraction-land if they didn’t expect us to check it out?

Well, I found out why. In the course of our half-day sightseeing, which included the obligatory visit to Chocolate World and the exquisite Hershey Gardens, we toured the Hershey Museum. Yes, it seemed a little scattered with its three separate collections (Native American, German Dutch and Hershey history) but what it really provided was a reminder of just what entrepreneurs do and how much of a difference one person can make to the business landscape.

Milton Hershey grew up in a household of very modest means and was sent to New York in his late teens to become a candy maker’s apprentice. A failure at the candy business in three cities, he returned to this area in Pennsylvania and set up shop there. He achieved some notoriety in standardizing the manufacture of caramel candies and become known for them. Then he set his sights on chocolate, then a strictly European delicacy. He then began incorporating milk (thus keeping local farmers in business) and sugar.

Convinced that there would be a market for “milk” chocolate, he sold his caramel business in 1900 for one million dollars. Let me write that again. That’s one million dollars in 1900 (approximately equal to $25 million today). He used the proceeds of the sale to perfect his milk chocolate process and the Hershey bar was born. Hershey’s Kisses followed a few years later and still look the same today—except their price has increased considerably from the half penny they were in 1903.

Hershey eventually made the decision to sell the caramel company and to concentrate on making only a few products on a massive scale, thus turning candy making from a local “mom and pop” industry in a nationwide one. Hershey’s entrepreneurialism led to mass production in an industry where it had never existed before and led to massive changes in an industry.

Hershey was quite the philanthropist in his day, using his profits to build the town of Hershey, then to build the attractions to bring tourists to town and fund a wide variety of causes including disadvantaged youth.

Of course, Milton Hershey is basically canonized everywhere you go in Hershey. One display in the museum quotes an employee of the 1930s saying how working at Hershey was really just fun all day, while the display on the opposite side of the room mentions the strike of 1937 and the subsequent unionization of Hershey’s plants. But leave it to those folks at AAMA to remind us how great success in business can be built on a conviction and a bowl of beans. Cacao beans.

Please visit http://www.usgnn.com/ for updates about the AAMA meeting.