In the late 1880s, Milton Snavely Hershey, an American entrepreneur, sought to invent a new kind of caramel. Years before, as an employee at a candy shop in Denver, he learned to cook a tender caramel infused with milk — a vast improvement over its gluelike competitors. Hershey added more and more milk to his confection, until he’d transformed his candy into a buttery dollop. Consumers went wild for it.

By the end of the 19th century, caramels were so popular that they ignited a candy boom, with companies competing to get into the caramel business. When the caramel bubble eventually burst, Hershey was already scouting for the next big thing, says Michael D’Antonio, author of “Hershey,” a biography. The candymaker saw that the Europeans were “crazy for chocolate,” D’Antonio says, especially the milky confection that the Swiss had invented, which was so different from the gritty, mouth-puckering lumps then sold in American stores. Hershey, D’Antonio says, “knew the future was chocolate.”

In the 1890s, Hershey traveled to Switzerland, bent on ferreting out the secret that turned bitter cocoa powder into silky chocolate. Back home, he holed up in his lab to develop a product that could survive a ride across the country’s growing railroad system. In 1900, he released his 5-cent bar. An early slogan — “More sustaining than meat” — promoted it as a daily necessity for health. When you unwrapped the bar, you found a postcard that mythologized Lancaster, Pa., “the chocolate town” where workers cavorted in a swimming park and cows roamed an emerald pasture.

Image Credit... Source: The New England Journal of Medicine

The town “was ‘Truman Show’-like because everyone participated in the conspiracy of utopia and perfection,” D’Antonio says. But behind the scenes, Hershey “was a dictator,” suppressing strikes when workers demanded better wages. Perhaps his megalomania explains why he chose chocolate: it could be branded with his name. “The product lent itself to shaping and stamping,” D’Antonio says. Hershey, who ruthlessly ruled his own little republic, “also wanted to mold human beings.”