Hershey’s Chocolate
Milton Hershey didn’t debut his famous chocolate at the Fair. But the fair still changed the world of chocolate. Hershey, a caramel maker, attended a demonstration given by a German chocolate manufacturer. This demonstration was so inspiring that he bought the equipment on display and brought it back to his factory.
He switched from caramels to chocolate, and applied a technique he learned as a caramel maker by adding milk to the product, a method used by Nestle at the time for a smooth and sweet chocolate. By 1894, the Hershey Chocolate Company became a subsidiary of his caramel company. Within a year, he was making chocolate, cocoa, and baking chocolate, and would rapidly expand from there. By 1900, he sold his caramel company for $1 million to focus on his chocolate enterprise. The rest is sweet history.
