FTV: How Sweet It Is
Okay, how many of you are willing to date yourselves by identifying the source of the following tag line, “How sweet it is!”? When did it become part of our common culture and to whom do you attribute this phrase? This is a bit of a trick question because most of us of the right age will say it was first widely used in the early 1960s by TV personality Jackie Gleason. Gleason’s TV career spanned so many versions of his variety show from the 1950s to 1970, we will suffice to say he first uttered it on his 1962 -1966 iteration, The Jackie Gleason Show: The American Scene Magazine. The phrase itself Gleason lifted from the 1963 film Papa’s Delicate Condition.
We could fill an entire FTV with Jackie Gleason’s many catch phrases (“And away we go” and “A little travelin’ music’) and characters. We should probably avoid the less politically correct lines from The Honeymooners that Ralph Kramden directed toward his wife Alice (involving trips to the Moon or socks to the kisser). My personal favorite was Joe the Bartender. Joe would pour a beer and jam his fingers in the glass to keep the head from spilling over (which of course it did when he did his finger dipping). Joe would then have a conversation with his unseen patron (‘Mr. Dennehy’ – the audience) usually about something he had read in the fictitious American Scene Magazine he had on the bar. Oddly enough, any time I heard the ‘How sweet it is’ line, my mind always went to . . . Hershey, Pennsylvania.
If you weren’t expecting this big build up to take you to Pennsylvania, blame the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel who revived these memories. As part of their on-going series (USA 250), they did an expansive piece about chocolate (Sunday, June 7 issue) and there isn’t any American brand more iconic than Hershey’s line of chocolate. Writer David P. Willis quoted Amy Harte of Dansville, PA who set the stage by saying, “Chocolate makes me feel warm and filled with good memories. We are Pennsylvania folk and when we think, chocolate, we think Hershey.” And yes, Hershey, PA owes both its name and fame to one Milton S. Hershey.
Hershey was born in 1857 and took an interest in confections at an early age. At the age of 14, he began a four year apprenticeship at Royer’s Ice Cream Parlor and Garden in Lancaster, PA. The Hershey Community Archives say that Milton learned the fine art of mixing ingredients and how to “feel the crack of the candy to know when to take it off of the heat”. He founded his own business in Philadelphia at the age of 18 selling candy, fruit, nuts, and ice cream. Within six years, the business went bust and he declared bankruptcy.
He traveled to Denver, Colorado and studied caramel making using fresh milk. He took his new found knowledge to New York City but his next business venture fared no better than his first. According to Amy Ziegler, the director of The Hershey Story Museum and the Hershey Community Archives, “He really had some significant struggles early on.” Returning to Lancaster, Hershey borrowed money from a friend to start a new business, the Lancaster Caramel Company. He began humbly by selling his caramels from a pushcart but his fortunes soon took an upward swing. He was able to convert a large sale in England into the cash he needed to expand the company and obtain more raw materials. By 1893, he was employing 1,500 workers.
Visiting the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that same year, he purchased chocolate-making equipment. This led to the 1894 establishment of the Hershey Chocolate Company as a subsidiary of the Lancaster Caramel Company. Ziegler pointed out that in those days, chocolate was only made in small batches and therefore was quite expensive. She said, “He really wanted to create a product that everyone would be able to enjoy.” His new venture specialized in novelty pieces such as fancy bars with fancy packaging. He invested many years into experimenting with milk chocolate recipes before selling the Lancaster Caramel Company to his biggest competitor. It was a sale that would be worth $38 million in 2026 dollars. Ziegler continues, “He decides that caramels are a fad. Chocolate is what is going to be permanent.”
Hershey needed fresh milk for his new chocolate recipe so he began buying up surrounding land and dairy farms. European chocolate makers used dried milk in their process but Hershey added sugar to fresh milk and condensed it. He opened his first chocolate factory in 1905 by which time he had perfected his recipe for milk chocolate. Ziegler pointed our that, “Hershey was an early adopter of branding, making his product easily recognizable just at a glance.” He packaged his bars in a maroon wrapper with silver lettering. They sold for 5 cents, a price that remained unchanged until the 1960s. Milton developed a way to mass produce his bars and by 1915, he owned the largest chocolate factory in the world.
Hershey was an innovator and his machine for wrapping Hershey Kisses replaced the old by hand method by 1921. His machine even inserted the famous paper streamer familiar to all who know the product today. He wasn’t done by a long shot as 1925 saw the introduction of Mr. Goodbar – Krackel followed in 1938. Hershey produced Ration-D chocolate bars for American soldiers during World War II. The miniature bars sold today began as samples salespeople would distribute on their rounds. The New York Stock Exchange began publicly trading Hershey stock in 1927. A different company owned by a dairy farmer named H.B.Reese began making and selling peanut butter covered in Hershey Chocolate. The inventor of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup had six sons who then sold the company to Hershey in 1963.
Those of us living in the shadow of the copper and iron mines of the Upper Peninsula know all about ‘company towns’. Hershey also built a town around his business that included houses and a bank. During the Great Depression, instead of laying off his work force, he put them to work constructing houses, a theater, hospital, amusement park, and a hotel. In 1923, he told the New York Times, “After all, what good is money unless you use it for the benefit of the community and of humanity in general?” Our own experiences with company towns were not driven by the same spirit of community well being as Hershey envisioned it.
Take the school he and his first wife, Catherine, established in 1909. They transferred 486 acres of land to the Hershey Industrial School for orphan boys. When his wife died, the childless Milton put the $60 million ownership of the Hershey Company in a trust for the school, The Milton Hershey School not only holds the controlling shareholder interest in the company but also 100 percent of Hershey Entertainment and Resorts. The school has grown from four boys in 1910 into a co-ed K-12 institution of 2,200 students. The students live at the school and all expenses are paid for by the trust including clothing, food, medical and dental care, eye-glasses, and housing. The trust had more than $23 billion in assets in 2024 and in 2025, they celebrated their 12,000th graduate.
The school’s president and a former graduate, Peter Gurt, said Milton had a, “One Hershey philosophy: All of the entities are designed to both support and strengthen all of its entities and that includes both the company, the town, and the school. Equally important are the opportunities that they provide our students and graduates for meaningful work experience and employability. We want them to hire and provide careers for many of the graduates that leave Milton Hershey School so that they can lead a successful and fulfilling life.” Can you imagine the world of today if more billionaire business owners bought into Milton Hershey’s philosophy instead of writing themselves golden parachute retirement checks?
Gurt continued saying, “We have had every one of the Ivy Leagues represented with our graduates, but we have had just as many plumbers and contractors and carpenters.” There are currently three Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning in Lancaster County serving children from birth to age 5. There are three more in the planning stage. Nancy Koehn, a historian at the Harvard Business School points out further impacts of the Hershey philosophy beyond educating students: “Chocolate is medicine. It has carved a very unique place in consumers’ hearts and minds. Hershey was really the first mover, so Hershey more than any other American company made the market for mass consumed milk chocolate. It wasn’t Baker and it wasn’t Mars.”
Would one expect a company like Hershey to sit on its laurels? The company began distributing York Peppermint Patties in 1975 before purchasing the company in 1988. The company that manufactures Twizzlers (Y&S Licorice) was bought in 1977 and reached $1 billion in sales by 1979. Leaf, Inc, the makers of Jolly Rancher, Milk Duds, Good & Plenty, and Heath was acquired in 1986, Hershey itself reached $5 billion in yearly sales in 2008. Hershey maintains plants all over the world but it has never abandoned Hershey, PA where it currently runs three manufacturing plants and a 819,000-square-foot fulfillment center.
They continued their diversity and expansion in 2018 with the acquisition of Amplify Brands, the company responsible for SkinnyPop Popcorn (adding another $1.6 billion brand to their ‘snacking powerhouse’). Another 2018 expansion added Pirate Booty Brands popcorn with Dot’s Pretzels following in 2021 to the tune of another $1.2 billion in sales. The Hershey Trust seems to have a knack for finding golden eggs at every turn, but there are some deals that did not work out.
The Trust killed a $125 billion take over by the Wm. Wrigley Company in 2002 . Both the community and the PA attorney general opposed the move and the company agreed it might harm the people of Lancaster County. Another $23 billion bid by the makers of Oreo Cookies was similarly turned away in 2016 with another unnamed food giant being rebuffed in 2024. With the economic times being what they are, Hershey was forced to raise their prices in mid-2025 due to the increased cost of ingredients, particularly cocoa.
The latest drama in Candyland erupted in February of this year when H.B.Reese’s grandson Brad accused Hershey of replacing the milk chocolate used in their peanut butter cups with ‘compound coatings’ and the peanut butter with ‘peanut butter cremes’. The company responded that the recipe for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups has not changed; the peanut butter is still made from fresh-roasted peanuts and the coating is still milk chocolate. They did admit to making ‘recipe adjustments’ so they could experiment with new shapes, sizes, and innovations.”
WOAS-FM has relied on income from a snack vending machine at the Ontonagon Area School for the past thirty years. We were able to make enough profit to support the station without needing to constantly raise our prices. Ten years ago, the profits were definitely lower but we maintained the same price structure so kids and adults had a snack option for those after school activities. When our supplier apologized for raising his prices twice over a couple of years, he explained that he was facing a double jeopardy situation. Manufacturers kept shrinking product sizes and upping the prices to the point where he had to tell his customers they would need to raise their prices, too. We finally had to bite the bullet and get with the times because there is no value for us if we give the products away.
One thing I have noticed even with the rising prices. Specialty and fancy imported chocolates have not just gone up in price, they have gone through the stratosphere. It reminds me of the people buying vinyl albums for $30 or more a pop when it was not that long ago they were complaining as the prices rose to the $15 range. Did they give up buying albums? No. Will the chocolate loving public give up chocolate? What do you think?
Top Piece Video: Okay, Sweet didn’t do any songs about chocolate that I am aware of – the name alone got them this Top Piece video honor – that and the song that was blasting out of the juke box at Syl’s when I wandered in to inquire about renting an apartment in August of 1975 was…you guessed it – Fox on the Run – Sweet and Abba were very popular at Syl’s back then!