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Last week, after dropping Ellie off at camp, I offered to stop at an ice cream stand in New Hampshire to buy my children ice cream. We pulled over, walked around to the window, and I saw the great big sign “Hershey’s Ice Cream”. Oh No! I’ve been boycotting Hershey’s for more than a year now and here I was confronted with a terrible choice: disappoint my children, who have been totally anticipating this huge treat, or stand up for my values. I decided to go with my gut, I do that a lot these days. I decided to buy the ice cream but point out that this was a major exception and that I would never have offered to get ice cream here if I’d realized it was a Hershey’s store.

Why boycott Hershey’s Chocolate? Many of my friends and family know that I’ve been boycotting Hershey’s for a little over a year. Even my children know that the reason I won’t buy them a lot of their favorite candy bars is because children have to help pick the “chocolate beans”. When asked, I’ll tell you that there are actually two reasons I’m boycotting The Hershey Company:



1) They said that they would certify that no children are enslaved to pick cacao beans starting in 2020. However, they haven’t said that they would certify any of their chocolate as Fair Trade, which is the best way to assure that no enslavement is being used in the cocoa fields. They also haven’t said what certification organization(s) they will be working with.

2) They were caught forcing students that were in the US on a work-travel program to work unreasonable hours, in unreasonable conditions and not giving them any chance to see the US. These are students that PAID $6000 each to come to the US. Their defense was that their subcontractor was responsible for the student employees. Wikipedia has a good summary of the situation which links to several source articles.

I decided to assuage my guilt by going inside and seeing if there were some good local products i could buy. I picked up some local mead and soap and went back out to join my family for ice cream.

I’m one of those people that reads everything and while we were enjoying our ice cream, I saw that it said on the cup “Made by Hershey Creamery Co.- not affiliated with Hershey’s Chocolate.” WHAT? Not affiliated with Hershey’s Chocolate? Are they kidding? They may have just made my day!

We snapped some pictures of the cup and the Ice Cream sign as well as the compostable spoons and my sons’ thrilled faces and I decided to look up the whole thing on the web. What I discovered is that the Hershey Creamery Co. and The Hershey Company were both founded in 1894 by groups of brothers with the last name Hershey, who all lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Wow. Crazy coincidence. Apparently each family went about their happy businesses until 1920 when the ice cream company started to branch into chocolate and the chocolate company filed their first trademark infringement lawsuit. Apparently the two companies “Hershey Creamery” and “Hershey Chocolate” have been suing each other over trademark issues ever since.

I further discovered that Hershey Creamery is still primarily owned by one family (there are shares of their stock in existence, but most are owned by family members and management has shown no interest in attracting investors), they use only all natural ingredients and don’t have any artificial colors and flavors. Sure, ice cream isn’t the healthiest food, but as far as ice creams go, apparently this one is pretty good. I feel like this discovery was my big green accomplishment of the week.

Honestly, I like Hershey’s Ice Cream and I like to be able to buy my kids a treat once in a while. It’s very frustrating to me to have to say no to my kids because of my values. I think that when I do, it teaches them a good lesson, and sets a good example for them, so I do it. But frankly, Hershey’s Chocolate Company makes so many products that it gets very frustrating to continually discover that things the kids like are made by a company that we have such issues with. It’s much easier with never go in stores like Walmart than to avoid products we see all over the place. literally in every check out isle. Discovering that the Hershey Creamery is not affiliated with Hershey’s Chocolate has really made my week!

Let me leave you with a fun fact: Hershey’s Creamer invented the flavor Moose Tracks in the 1940’s.

Happy Green Eating!

Alicia

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