October 28, 2019 • 41 mins
A little alien who wanted to phone home proved to be a big win for a candy product from Hershey's and it launched an era of product placement in film. But what's the story behind the name Reese's anyway?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Business on the Brink, a production from I
Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. It was the early
eighties and a successful young filmmaker named Stephen Spielberg was
looking for something sweet. He wanted to make a squat, gray,
(00:24):
wrinkled alien lovable, and part of that hinged on the
critter developing a taste for candy. His first choice was Eminem's,
but when asked about it, the Mars Candy Company told
Spielberg to phone home. He'd have to go with choice
number two. This is Reese's on Business on the Brink.
(00:53):
Hey there, I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Ariel Castin, and
welcome to our spooky Halloween episode us. It was an
episode requested by my co worker Ramsey, who wanted us
just to talk about Reese's pieces. However, before we get
into that, you know we're gonna have a lot of
fun with this episode. And spoiler alert, we actually already
recorded the whole thing, but in retrospect, we figured we
(01:17):
really can't talk about this without addressing something that's much
more serious. So we wanted to get that clear up front,
which is that the candy industry a lot of companies
that get chocolate are dependent upon extremely terrible, awful, inhumane practices,
(01:37):
largely involving child labor and even child slavery, and there
have been uh regulations and kind of deadlines put into
place to make chocolate companies fix that. But they're having
a hard time, they say, because they don't know where
a lot of their chocolate is actually sourced, which seems
pretty corporate, irresponsibly yeah type of thing going on. Yeah,
(02:01):
so this is something you may have heard of, the
phrase fair trade chocolate. That's you know, obviously, that's chocolate
that's been sourced to a place that does not engage
in these practices. But Hersh's which supplies the chocolate actually
now Reese's as part of her She's you'll hear all
about that. Uh, But Hershey's, which has always supplied the
chocolate for the Reese's Peanut buttercups, is one of those companies,
(02:25):
and so we wanted to make sure we acknowledged that
before we go on to the zany fun of the episode,
which I know is a big tonal shift, but and
after we recorded it, we realized we really needed to
to address that because it's it's something that we think
is extremely important that people know. Yes. Yeah, So now
that we've got that, we're going to rejoin Jonathan and
(02:50):
Ariel from the past, who already recorded the episode that's
extra spook. Yeah, welcome to our spooky Halloween episode. We
were trying to come up with a topic that would
be suitable for Halloween, and while chatting with my coworker Ramsey,
he said, you should do an episode about Reese's pieces
and how they ended up in et when everyone supposed
(03:14):
to be a a Yeah, but you know what, Ramsey, there's
not enough information on Reesa's pieces. Also a lot of
people know that story, but we're gonna include it anyway.
But more importantly, Ramsey's awesome. His suggestion was awesome. It
is awesome, Thank you, Ramsey, and it led us on
this wonderful trail to the business history of Reese's in general,
which is pretty fantastic. Well, and it's it's funny because
(03:34):
it's a history that was largely ignored starting in the
late seventies because of the company that would take over races.
Because well, we'll get there. I don't get that, we'll
get no spoilers jumping way ahead, Jimmy way, all right,
So let's start with that history, and it all begins
with the founder of the company. Oh and by the way,
(03:58):
you might occasionally here in this episode a little crinkly
noises because Ariel and I each have a Reese's Peanut
butter cup, a manager one, the kind you would get
at Halloween. It is so hard not to eat it
at this very second, I know I'm trying to hold
off myself. Okay, so start with the history. Harry Burnett
Reese is who we can thank for the Reese's Peanut
butter cup. He actually I have in my notes. He
(04:21):
had aspirations of becoming a real life Willy Wonka forty
years before Dahl would write that book. That's being a
little tongue in cheek facetious. But he was born in
Pennsylvania in eighteen seventy nine and by the year nine
he had married a woman named Blanche Edna Hyson, and
he started working as a farmer on the family farm
(04:44):
at Frosty Hill, which is near Muddy Creek Forks. Then
in my notes, I wrote, this makes me think that
this isn't one of the best spots in Pennsylvania based
on the name. I mean, if it's Frosty then the
mud is probably not like squishy, So bring Muddy Hill.
That's where my farm is. And he would end up
working several different jobs in his young adulthood, and he
(05:09):
was like, he got a reputation for picking up and
moving with his whole family multiple times in order to
pursue these opportunities. Eventually, he and his wife and now children,
of which he would ultimately have several sixteen intervals, would
settle in Hershey, Pennsylvania, which I've been to. Have you
(05:29):
been to Hershey? I have not. I have been to Pittsburgh. Yes,
that's it. Yeah, so my wife's from Pennsylvania and we've
been to Hershey several times. It's also where the Pennsylvania
Renaissance Festival takes place. I hear. That's fantastic is and
Hershey is obviously a monument to chocolate. Even back then,
Hershey's the the Chocolate Company was a thing. Yeah, but
(05:50):
that's that's not where Reese started in Hershey. He started
working at a dairy farm called the Round Barn in
like nineteen sixteen. But here's the thing, Round Barn owned
by Hershey. So yeah, he technically he was, but he
wasn't working straightly strictly for the chocolate tier. He was
(06:10):
working for the dairy farm. Yes, so he worked there
for a couple of years, but then Hershey's, in a
cost saving measure, closed that dairy farm in nineteen nineteen,
and so then Rees's went over to try and do
some other stuff, including create his own candy company. Now
(06:31):
that initial attempt was the R and R Candy Company,
and he was largely basing his his recipes off of
his mother's recipes, and they included things like chocolate covered
almonds and chocolate covered raisins, taking the things that kids
don't want to eat at Halloween and dipping them in chocolate. Yeah,
and uh, it did not end up becoming a huge success.
(06:55):
And I mean even at the time, like Hershey's was
already a dominant player in pocolate. We'll have to do
a full episode on Hershe's at some point. But when
you think of her She's, you think of hershey Bars,
and he's focusing it looks like on little I Can't
held candies. Yeah, he's looking for the stuff that would
be sold in like the big barrels at a general store.
Because this is also before you know grocery stores and
(07:15):
department stores are really a thing. Yeah, so our in
our candy company didn't do well, and so he rebranded.
He called the new company the Superior Chocolate and Confectionery Company,
which is superior to our and R Candy I suppose yep.
He tried to sell some stock in order to fund
this business, but this also did not take off, and
(07:37):
pretty soon he was closing the doors on that one,
and not too long after that he would go back
and work for her She's again, this time in the
shipping department, which where he was sneaking little chocolate covered
raisins into everybody's packages with a little note saying, if
you want more of these, cover Superior. Now. He did
(07:59):
not find the particularly engaging or interesting, but it was
paying the bills, and in the meantime, he continued to
create different recipes for his own candy, working out of
his basement's um hygienic basement candy. Well, here's the thing,
you know, I will eat basement candy, maybe everything but
(08:21):
bathroom candy. Okay, that's fair. Well, you know why he
was making his basement. It's because this is before air conditioning,
so the temperature would get too warm, especially during the
summer months. Like in summer they couldn't make chocolate at
all because the temperature would be so warm they could
never get the candy to set properly. It would always
be that kind of sweaty, melty stuff. So the basement
(08:46):
was the coolest room to work in, so you could
heat up the chocolate, mold it, and let it cool
and set there. So that's why he set up down there. Yeah.
So I think it's really cool that some of the
candy was he named after his kids, yes, right, yeah,
And not only that, but it was the successful stuff
that he was making. Yeah, so that this is what
(09:07):
would actually help establish him and convince him to make
a real go of it. Yet again, So do you
know the name of the candy bars? Well, I do, Jonathan,
because it's right here in our nose and frost. Okay,
let's not. Don't peel back the curtain too far. I'm sorry. Okay, No,
there's the Lizzie Bar, which was carmel and coconut covered
(09:27):
in chocolate. Sign me up. You know. I first read
it and I was like, m hmm, but I could
totally see mixing a Snickers in an almond in a
mound's bar, and I'd be happy, and I love coconuts
so much together with the caramel took me by surprise
for a little bit. And the other one was the
Johnny Bar, which is made from alasses. So I guess
similar to a sugar daddy, maybe, yeah, kind of yeah.
(09:49):
And so he had sixteen kids that I mentioned in total,
eight boys and eight girls. They tragically not all of
them would live to adulthood, but you know, he had
had so many kids, and every single history has a
similar joke about how the chocolate business was necessity because
(10:11):
of his large family. And uh, they had a great
advertising slogan that would come a little bit later down
the road, but I wanted to include it now. Arial
could you please deliver that slogan sixteen good reasons to
buy Reese's. Yep, they would have a picture of all
the kids lined up, so essentially saying exactly, buy candy
(10:33):
so we can feed these children. So, uh, this was
enough for him to be convinced to give another go
about actually starting a candy company of his own, because
these these chocolate bars named after his kids were starting
to see some success. And so once again he quit
his job at Hershey's and he founded the H. B.
(10:56):
Reese Candy Company in nineteen twenty three. And you know,
he was already selling candy at this point and that
was enough for him to actually make a living. So
now he was just creating the company to make that
his full time gig. Yeah. And the candies he was
making around the time where things like peppermint creams, encoded
dates and things like that still in the raisins and
(11:16):
almonds arena, and he, as you said he was, he
was trying to sell them in like the general stores
and the barrels. So he sold them on consignment to
local shops in Pennsylvania. And he had made enough money
to build a new house, probably because he ruined his
basement and his old one. That's an assumption by me, Ariel,
but I'm sticking to it. And also enough money to
(11:38):
build a factory. Yes, So now he's like hiring people
he's making he's making these candies in uh, in larger amounts.
And by hiring people, um, I think you can imagine
what much of his workforce was made up of his children,
which is almost the same thing that I don't know
if they would sing songs about, you know, being greedy
(11:59):
or chewing gum all the time, but they definitely would
work for him quite a bit. We'll get back to
the family issues a bit later. So in ninete, Reese
happened to fall into a conversation with a local shop
owner who was telling Reese, you know, my customers really
like these peanut butter cups that this other candy company,
(12:22):
this other candy maker is making. In your face, Reese, yeah,
so so peanut butter cups. Chocolate covered peanut butter cups
were already a thing. Okay, Reese had never made them,
but they were they were a known quantity. So Reese
did not invent the peanut butter cup um. And but
he was being told by the shop owner, the problem is,
(12:42):
this candy maker can't make enough of these peanut butter
these chocolate covered peanut butter cups to meet the demand
my customers have. They are always asking for them. So
do you think you could make some? And Reese wasn't
super crazy about this, just he didn't that was not
what he was really interested in doing. But he thought, well,
there's a demand, I should definitely try to meet that.
(13:04):
So he got to work and um, he started roasting
his own peanuts, which for a long time was like
the thing that Reese's would say, set their peanut butter
cups apart from everyone else's. Yeah, but that's because he
almost burned his peanuts. Yeah. Apparently, according to the histories,
(13:24):
there was a malfunction in the roasting equipment which over
roasted the peanuts almost to the point of burning them,
and then he ended up turning it into peanut butter anyway,
and it was a happy mistake because it produced a
peanut butter that people found particularly tasty. Yeah, but imagine
when you're trying to cook peanuts to a certain level
and then you overcook him, and now you have to
overcook him that exact amount every time to keep your
(13:48):
to maintain like a standard. Yeah. I ad meant that
once he fixed that roaster, he had to figure out
how to replicate the effect with a roaster that was
actually working properly. And then he covered the burnt peanut
butter in Hershey's chocolate. Yes, And this would be something
that is an interesting, interesting kind of sympatico relationship because
(14:11):
throughout his career Reese would use chocolate from Hershey's. He
would purchase the chocolate from Hershey's, and Hershey's would send
him the chocolate needed. He and her She had a
good working relationship. It's it's not uncommon for confectioners to
outsource their chocolate from other people. Yeah, and so this
was one of those cases where, uh, this was not
(14:33):
even a rivalry so much as it was like like
just two different companies doing business in the same area.
But they both realized there was enough room. Plus, I mean,
Hershey's was operating at a level far beyond what Reese
was doing at this point. So then he introduces the
peanut butter cup. That's not what they were called originally. No,
(14:54):
they were called penny cups. That's how much they cost,
one penny a cup. That's also that's also the same.
It's a good exchange rate. When you said one one
one cup of penny, or however you said it, I
just pictured someone like throwing pennies into a cup. That's
fair enough. That's fair enough, which you weren't incorrect. My
(15:17):
brain just went weird anyhow. Sorry. We actually have the
date that they debuted too. It was November. Are you certain,
because oftentimes dates are shaky, I mean sure enough to
put it into the notes that's super awesome. To be fair, yes,
the histories state November fift it could give or take
(15:38):
five years, but for once, we're not getting so many
conflicting reports on the date, so it's it's pretty spectacular.
So he originally sold these peanut butter cups in bulk
mixed up with all of his other candies in five
pound bags. But you know what, people like the peanut
butter cups better than the chocolate covered dates, and so
again Reese was not super thrilled with that. He he
(15:59):
was not a fan of the peanut butter cups, but
you got to give the people what they want. So
he would continue to make them, and eventually it would
take a couple of years, but eventually it got to
the point where he could make them solely on their
own and sell those as a separate item as opposed
to being one item in a five pound bag of
(16:22):
bulk candy. So they got popular enough where they could
stand out as a single item, which was unusual at
the time. And then we get to a brink moment. Yeah,
so this was a bring moment that was not unique
to Reese's. It was not something go ahead and unwrap
(16:44):
that candy I'm gonna I'm not gonna eat it. I'm
just unwrapping it. Okay, that's fair. She really, she literally is.
That's not that's not us doing sound effects. She really
did just do that anyway. So this bring moment was
a bring moment that happened to the entire world. This
is not something that was unique to Reese's and not
a moment would be if you're keeping track of what year.
It is the Great Depression, and it was almost enough
(17:06):
to bring the story to an end, and then we
would have two segments of nothing. But we've got a
little more to explain right after this break. So the
Great Depression hit, you are right of their areal. Yeah,
I'm your started before I'm done with this peanut butter. Okay,
(17:29):
I wasn't going to eat it, but um, it smelled
really peanut butter and good. I can taste those burnt peanuts. Okay,
I need another one, Well, this one's mine. Originally, guys,
I wanted to just bring this giant bag of rees
peanut butter cups and see how many I could eat
throughout the episode episode. But I'm sparing you all of
(17:51):
that smacking noise. If you want to take that challenge
on yourselves. Please do let us know how many you ate. Yes,
you can, but don't tell us how much you threw up.
Ariel will keep it tally and then as a reward,
will name whoever ate the most of the end. But
be honest. All right, we don't want you saying I
ate a thousand Reese's peanut butter it cups No, Okay,
(18:11):
let's get back to the story. The Great Depression really
hit Reese very hard, and he was so short on
cash that, according to the stories, he got to the
point where he wasn't able to pay his employees in money,
so he paid them in candies. I mean I would
be happy, I mean, but his employees were his kids, right.
(18:32):
Well know, yeah, that's that's you know, fun in theory,
but not very practical. Yeah, you can't pay your rent
in candy most of the time, and his employees complained
in The sheriff even came after him, and he went
into hiding. And yes, he kind of reminds me of
the Ozarks. Yeah, he ran off to hide at his
old family farm while the sheriff was looking for him.
(18:53):
So things were pretty grim, and he decided that in
order to to make it through the hard times that
he actually would go back to farming, especially in the
summer months, because again it was too warm to make
the candy, So he ended up putting his workers to
work doing stuff like canning vegetables, So people who had
(19:16):
been making chocolates were now canning, Like, maybe they'd make
those canned lama beans taste better. I like chocolate. I
would eat those. He also would end up in order
to keep his business afloat, and he secured several loans
to make sure everything was in operation. Now. Obviously, that
(19:40):
in itself meant that he was taking on a big
risk because now he had debt he needed to pay
off in addition to just making sure that he could
make ends meet, you know, day to day. Yeah, but
here's the thing, people still really liked his peanut butter cups.
I guess they brought him a little bit of joy
in the midst of all this financial turmoil. Yeah. Yeah,
it's one of those things where it was a luxury
(20:02):
that people were willing to pay for on occasion, and
it was relatively affordable. Yeah, it wasn't like it was
super expensive. So the peanut butter cups were incredibly popular
and kept him in business. And by n five, because
of that popularity, he had actually made enough money to
pay off all that debt. So it was only a
few years that he had this debt over him, and
(20:23):
then literally the peanut butter cup was what allowed him
to to get out from under it. Yeah, but you
know what, he still couldn't give up on those chocolate
covered dates, not for a while until World War te
was stubborn. Yes, so the Great Depression kept all of
his other like he was still making other types of candies.
(20:44):
But the World War Two was a different story because
during World War Two the United States government put strict
rationing on a lot of different staples, sugar exactly, and
so with sugar under this rationing, Reese was not going
to be able to make enough of the candies. However,
one thing that wasn't rationed was peanut butter, so that man,
(21:08):
he had plenty of peanut butter, and he could still
buy chocolate from Hershey's. Her she was still agreeing to
sell Reese chocolate, so that meant he could still make
the peanut butter cup. And ultimately he said, all right, well,
the only thing that makes sense is to just make
peanut butter cups, and it was a good decision. It
(21:29):
kept him in business. So he keeps on churning these
things out, and at this point he has um really
focused specifically on just making peanut butter cups. By the
mid nineteen fifties, UM it had gotten to the point
where they were going to need to expand again. They
were going to need to build essentially a new factory
(21:51):
that they had outgrown their old one, and UM they
decided that they were going to actually build this thing
and it was scheduled to open in nineteen fifty seven
like that. That was kind of the target of when
this would come online. But HB. Reese himself would not
live to see that come to pass. He would pass
(22:13):
away on May sixteenth, nineteen fifties, six one year before
the new facility would come online. Man, that's really sad.
But what's even sadder is the fact that he left
his company to his sons. He excluded his daughters from
his will, from his will, and then his not all
of his sons all I guess eight of them, six
(22:34):
of them, six of them, six of them at that
point wanted the company. So there was all of this
in fighting on whether they should sell it or keep it. Yeah,
the sons didn't all get along with each other, and
yet because of the will, they were each named two
different positions of authority in the in the company. So
get six people who don't like each other and then
(22:55):
tell them they have to lead a company together. You
can imagine that's not gonna smoothly. So yeah, there was
this whole thing about who, whether they should keep the company,
whether they should sell the company. They had built the
manufacturing facility. This was an interesting thing too, because it
shows how how Reese's was interesting in its marketing. I mean,
(23:19):
you know they had done this sixteen good reasons to
buy a resas. They had gone from marketing Reese's as
being sort of a hand dipped candy to now that
they have the new manufacturing facility saying untouched by human hands,
which also makes me think of Willy Wonka, which kind
of makes it go from like a little home good
field to a super technical candy of the future field. Yes, so,
(23:43):
by the time the nineteen sixties rolled around, it was
pretty obvious that her that Reese's sons were not going
to be running the company forever, at least not all
of them, and so this because some of them were
looking around at the possibility of selling the company off.
They looked specifically to her She because and her She
(24:05):
and her She had heard about it. Yeah, and her
She already had a stake in this candy. Yes, so
the company her She takes a look and says, all right, well,
will make you an offer. And this ended up being
a big point of argument amongst the Suns, And then
eventually they came to an agreement and they decided to
(24:26):
sell to her She's um and and the ones who
wanted to stay with the company became employees of her She's. Yeah,
some of the men joined the board of directors for
Her She's, and then the others kind of went their
own way, and it would become one of the best
selling candies out of Hershey's. That's because it's delicious, y'all. Yeah.
(24:47):
Now we're gonna skip ahead a bit in the story,
because I mean, ultimately the story is like, and they
kept making recus peanut butter cups, and people kept buying them,
and they kept eating them, and then they kept making
them and c even years pass and now we get
a very famous ad campaign which I remember from my childhood,
because it was still going when I was a kid.
(25:09):
But we're into the nineteen seventies now, and this was
a campaign that would ruffle some feathers among people who
knew Reese and who were familiar with the history of Rees's.
There was a guy named billings fuse, A a who
was a director at an ad firm that said, all right,
(25:30):
we're going to do an ad campaign where people are
going to accidentally create the combination of chocolate and peanut butter.
According to him, he was saying, people just aren't convinced
that chocolate and peanut butter is a good combination. Is crazy.
The whole reason that Reese started making them is because
the candy was selling out. Yeah, there was a demand,
and it had been in demand for for like four decades,
(25:53):
and they it was it was an obviously successful candy. Yeah,
I mean it was one of her She's best sellers too.
But for the basis of this ad campaign, they wanted
it to look like Hershey's had come up with this
brand new idea almost by accident. You just accidentally got
peanut butter and chocolate colliding together. Yes, And that's exactly
what the ad campaign was. It would be. It would
(26:14):
be all these different scenarios where someone's carrying like a
chocolate bar and someone else has got, like, you know,
a spoon of peanut butter as you normally would, and
then through happenstance, the to collide and you get some
variation of Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate,
Hey you got chocolate peanut butter, And they try and
(26:35):
they're like, say, chocolate and peanut butter. Who knew everybody? Yeah,
that's the thing everybody knew. I mean, I do have
friends who do not like chocolate peanut butter together, but
I have former friends who do not like chocolate. I
respect them. I don't understand it. It's okay if you
don't like peanut butter and chocolate together, we still love you, yea.
So maybe you could argue that this was their first
(26:57):
national ad campaign for Reese's peanut buttercups, really is the
first national ad campaign for Hershe's in general. So you
maybe you could argue that these particular chocolate covered peanut
butter cups were mostly known in the Northeast and the
regions around that where Hershey's was shipping this stuff, and
that maybe nationwide, it wasn't as big a deal, but
(27:19):
this changed that because whether you agreed with the ad
campaign or not, whether or not you were upset that
Hersy's was effectively erasing the history of this peanut butter
cup and therefore also of HB. Reese. The campaign was
a success and sales skyrocketed. Yes, okay, now we're going
(27:41):
to skip ahead to and her She's was working with
a peanut butter powder. Yes, this was different than the
peanut butter in the cups. Yes, they took all the
oil out of it. Yes, it's dry. Yes, And that
way they could mold it into shapes and use it
as baking chips and things like that. And then they
could cover it. And I was going to steal that
from and I'm jealous, so he would cover it. They'd
(28:05):
cover it in candy coating. And they had these powdered
peanut butter candy coated things that they needed to market
to push. You know what, we're gonna get back into that.
I need to take a break and fund another peanut buttercup.
I'm going to lick the paper. So this peanut butter
(28:30):
flavored powder that Hershey's had created had the consistency similar
to chocolate. So again, it's not the same stuff that
was in a Reese's peanut butter. You can say that again.
And it was it was meant to be used in
stuff like baking chips. Yeah, where you don't want the
oil because it will ruin the consistency of your batter exactly.
Aerial is by the way, in case you do not know,
(28:50):
this an incredible baker. I've only been able to sample
the stuff she's baked on a couple of occasions. It's
always phenomenal. I need to make some of my peanut
butter shortbread cookies. Yes, you do. So they introduced this
this candy coated peanut butter powder stuff in and um
(29:12):
they had already introduced a candy coated like chocolate years before.
But Eminem's had that market sewn up, so her she
has gotten out of that, which is of them. Yeah,
so in this case, they're like, well, this is different
because it's peanut butter, it's not chocolate. And they needed
a name for it, so they settled on the amazing
name Pebs. Pebs did not did not really strike anyone
(29:35):
as interesting. Um, As I mentioned, they had already had
a previous candy coated chocolate that was called the Hershey
Ets as a great name. Yeah, And then they realized
that there was a problem with the name Pebs. And
it wasn't that Pebs was not capturing the imagination. Skippy
has a peebe bites sort of product right now. The
(29:58):
problem that they read into was peb Ease would be
very hard for them to trademark. Yeah, So they needed
to come up with a different name so that they
could trade market and make sure that they protected their
their intellectual property. Yea. So they called them Reese's Pieces,
which I just want to say is a huge misnomer
because if you go to eat a Reese's Pieces expecting
the same wonderful flavor you get from a Reese's peanut
(30:20):
butter cup, You're going to be sorely disappointed. It is
a very different experience. It doesn't have that salty, mommy
peanut butter flavor. Yeah, and you're missing the oil too,
which does make a difference now and all of the chocolate.
There's no chocolate in Reese's Pieces, But also beyond that,
(30:41):
there's literally no connection to Reese's right, Like it wasn't
made by Reese. This was not This was not a
peanut butter powder that here. It has none of the
same ingredients. Really, yeah, woman, he's got peanuts, but but
not like the peanut butter exactly. So it's this is
where they ended up using Ee's name as a brand
(31:02):
of its own, rather than there's no connection to the
man Reese. But then, to be fair, this isn't really fair,
but to to illustrate why Hershey's had largely, you know,
erased Reese's history in their marketing. So the name really
didn't mean anything anyway. It was just a name. It
was it was it was something to grab people's attention.
(31:24):
If oh, I like this one product, so I'm gonna
like this other one too. It was a brand um
and it did really well at first. Yep. It was
like you know, brand new candy. So I got people's
attention and sales were pretty good. But then after that
initial burst of popularity, the sales kind of flagged a
little bit, which was problematic because Hershey's was investing in
(31:44):
new manufacturing facilities. Yeah right, so they really couldn't afford
to have declines in sales. It's not unusual to see
a new candy like come out the gate swinging and
then let's just mixing metaphors. But then, uh, I'd love
to see a horse come out of the gate swinging
there like, wow, that horse is angry and fast. No it,
(32:06):
But coming out of the gate going full tilt and
then slowing down, that's not unusual. But they were worried
that the rate of slowdown might be an indicator that
they could end up with a very medium, you know,
mediocre kind of performing candy. Yeah, they wouldn't make back
all of their investment into it. And so this is
where we get to eat. Yes, the opportunity of Et
(32:28):
the Extra Terrestrial. So am Bulow Productions was making this movie,
and they're different versions of this story. So there's a
lot of he said, she said kind of stuff out there,
and there's a lot of stuff where people are just
making assumptions. But we're gonna try and give the general
gist of what happened. Yeah, so, uh, Spielberg wanted the
(32:49):
main character, Elliott. Yeah, yeah, uh sorry we did that
to you guys, to use candy to basically get Et
the alien in to trust him. Yes, this is the
famous trail of candy that was lampooned in Family guy
with James Woods, as I called piece of candy candy, Yeah,
(33:12):
originally that candy. They wanted it to be Eminem's. Yes,
And so they went to Mars because another thing they
were hoping to do was do some product like actual
product placement, which was not common. Yeah, that was a
brand new idea really in the early nineties. The concept
being that hey, we're going to use your product front
and center in our movie, and in return, we will
(33:36):
get some form of support from you. In this case,
they were really looking at marketing support, like ad campaigns
that would tie into the movie and thus help promote
the film. They weren't looking for production costs, which is
what a lot of product placement does now. Adam Sandler movies, Yeah,
(33:56):
so many movies. I watched so many TV shows where
I'm light product placement, product place where are very conveniently
pointed straight at the camera, or certain shows will just
flat out they don't even try to hide it anymore.
They're just like commercial in the middle of the show. Anyhow,
we're getting off track. One of the story says that
the president of Mars, who owned Eminem's, didn't think the
film would be successful, and that's why he said, now. Yes.
(34:19):
There are other stories that say they were nervous about
any sort of movie about an alien because the movie
Alien had come out not too long ago and it
scared the pants off people, and so the thought was, well,
I don't want our candy to be associated with something
like that. Whatever the reason is, whether it's one of
those or something entirely different, what we do know is
(34:41):
Mars past on this opportunity. Then the next part of
the story goes that a VP at Amblin turned to
his son, his young son, and said what kind of
candy would be best to lure a e t out
into the open? If Eminem's isn't available, mart Move Amblin
VP yes, and his son said Reese's Pieces, which the
(35:04):
VP said, yeah, he had never heard of the candy before,
and then universal Slash Amblin would reach out to her
She's would essentially the same offer, although according to least
some stories, they actually shot a sequence using Reese's Pieces
before they even talked to her. She's and essentially said
(35:25):
here it is. Would you like to would you like
to be part of this? Other versions of the story
say no, no, no. Jack Dould, who as director of
New product development over at Hershey's, flew out, got to
see a bunch of very early stuff about ET, but
not like a finished sequence, and then was convinced that
(35:46):
this was gonna be a good idea and that they
should be on the ground floor. So he said, yes,
we will do that, and then he had to go
back to her She's and convince everyone at Hershey's that
it was a good Yeah, that we're going to spend
money on marketing for this film so that we can
also market our candy, and people were not It took
them a little bit. Yeah, they were not totally on board.
(36:06):
It was. It was actually a hard sell. Uh, there's
it's it's funny because there's some stories that say he
went to uh to his coworkers and he showed them
some early pictures of ET and they're all like, he's ugly.
And then it wasn't until they were able to watch
(36:28):
a finished cut of the movie that they were like,
oh as they cried their eyes out as any human
being with a beating Heartwood after watching ET certainly certainly,
which is why I don't watch it anymore because so beauty,
it's too beautiful. I think I saw it like virus.
It's too beautiful, But it was really successful. The sale
of Reese's pieces increased by six and that was early on.
(36:52):
There's some figures that have that as high as three.
So it was clear a great tie in. The marketing
campaign was a huge success. The sale of Reese's pieces
were so popular that actually outpaced the sale of Eminem's
during that same time. A positive brink. Yeah, this is
(37:14):
definitely one of those positive moments. And this is also
a moment where some people will point to it and
they'll say, man, Mars made a bone headed decision. Can
you believe that they passed on ET? Here's where I
want to be a little fair. There was no way
of knowing at the time that ET was going to
be a big hit. Steven Spielberg had made some great
movies already, he had made Jaws, he had made Close
(37:36):
Encounters of the third kind, but he was not yet
known as like a master filmmaker, and so there was
no assurance that ET was going to really work. So also,
you don't know if Mars even had the marketing budget
that year to to put towards something like that. So
there are a lot of a lot of factors that
(37:58):
could have fed into Mars say, know that aren't just
based on Oh well, that movie is never gonna work.
So I think one, it's important to remember where Reesis
came from. So thank you Ramsey for suggesting this, because
it's so much bigger than the Reese's Pieces story. But also, uh,
(38:19):
this history kind of tells us that, you know, when
you're hitting a hard time, look at what's working and
invest in that. Yes, yeah, it's it's an important thing
to say, Like, I could keep going with all my
different lines of business, but if the if that's going
to be a real big challenge and there's one specific
(38:39):
part that's doing really well, maybe it's best for me
to just focus all my efforts there, at least for
the time being. Um. Another thing I would mention is
that Mars did get Eminem's into et in a way
because in the novel version of et Et it's still
Eminem's because the novel was written before the deal filter.
(38:59):
I didn't know there was a novel. Of course, there's
a novelization of the film, and in that one it's
Eminem's not Reese's Pieces. Yeah, well we have a we
have a fun fact here. Yep, yep, we have. If
you've ever actually enjoyed or endured Reese's pieces, then you
may have noticed that there's not as many colors as
(39:22):
you might find in say a bag of Eminem's. There
in fact, only three colors. There's orange, and there's yellow,
and there's brown, and you're gonna get way more of
one of those than the other two, which is orange. Yes,
the orange makes up of all the candy pieces that
are made, and then the other fift is divided evenly
(39:42):
between yellow and brown. It makes sense because yellow and
brown is a color candy. But when you think Reces,
you think orange trappers. So that's that's why if you
ever get Reese's and you open up a bag and
you're like, man, there are a lot of oranges in
this one, well, it's because they make twice as many
a man. I hate when I get oranges inside my
bags of can d okay, And I also want to clarify,
(40:03):
and then we're gonna let you guys go, because we
know we've gone a little bit long that I don't
endure Reese's pieces. I just needed to know the first
time I tried them that it wasn't chocolate covered Reese's
peanut butter It would have been so much better if
I had been prepared. Yeah, I well, you know, I
had a lot of Reese's pieces when I was a kid,
because again I was I loved et and that marketing
(40:25):
totally worked on me. But these days, if I'm going
to have something with Reese's name on it, it's going
to be a peanut butter cup me too, because they
are amazing and I probably should not have eaten the
one that I had. I'll just have to get on
the treadmill for another. Like our fine. Yeah, so well,
Jonathan's on the treadmill. If this story has inspired you
(40:46):
to think of topics that you'd like to hear us
talk about, you can email us at Feedback at the
Brink Podcast dot show and let us know. Yeah. You
can also visit our website, The Brink Podcast dot Show.
That's where you're gonna find more information about the two
of us, as well as an archive of all of
our past episodes. Yep, and if you like listening to
the Brink, please tell your friends, you know, give us
(41:07):
a positive review. We'd really appreciate it. Yeah, share the
love because we're having a lot of fun covering these
and Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. All right, Well until next time.
I Am Spooky Jonathan Strickland, I Am Creepy aerial cast
I'm like the paper Business. On the Brink is a
(41:32):
production of I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. For
more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Welcome to Business on the Brink, a production from I
Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. It was the early
eighties and a successful young filmmaker named Stephen Spielberg was
looking for something sweet. He wanted to make a squat, gray,
(00:24):
wrinkled alien lovable, and part of that hinged on the
critter developing a taste for candy. His first choice was Eminem's,
but when asked about it, the Mars Candy Company told
Spielberg to phone home. He'd have to go with choice
number two. This is Reese's on Business on the Brink.
(00:53):
Hey there, I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Ariel Castin, and
welcome to our spooky Halloween episode us. It was an
episode requested by my co worker Ramsey, who wanted us
just to talk about Reese's pieces. However, before we get
into that, you know we're gonna have a lot of
fun with this episode. And spoiler alert, we actually already
recorded the whole thing, but in retrospect, we figured we
(01:17):
really can't talk about this without addressing something that's much
more serious. So we wanted to get that clear up front,
which is that the candy industry a lot of companies
that get chocolate are dependent upon extremely terrible, awful, inhumane practices,
(01:37):
largely involving child labor and even child slavery, and there
have been uh regulations and kind of deadlines put into
place to make chocolate companies fix that. But they're having
a hard time, they say, because they don't know where
a lot of their chocolate is actually sourced, which seems
pretty corporate, irresponsibly yeah type of thing going on. Yeah,
(02:01):
so this is something you may have heard of, the
phrase fair trade chocolate. That's you know, obviously, that's chocolate
that's been sourced to a place that does not engage
in these practices. But Hersh's which supplies the chocolate actually
now Reese's as part of her She's you'll hear all
about that. Uh, But Hershey's, which has always supplied the
chocolate for the Reese's Peanut buttercups, is one of those companies,
(02:25):
and so we wanted to make sure we acknowledged that
before we go on to the zany fun of the episode,
which I know is a big tonal shift, but and
after we recorded it, we realized we really needed to
to address that because it's it's something that we think
is extremely important that people know. Yes. Yeah, So now
that we've got that, we're going to rejoin Jonathan and
(02:50):
Ariel from the past, who already recorded the episode that's
extra spook. Yeah, welcome to our spooky Halloween episode. We
were trying to come up with a topic that would
be suitable for Halloween, and while chatting with my coworker Ramsey,
he said, you should do an episode about Reese's pieces
and how they ended up in et when everyone supposed
(03:14):
to be a a Yeah, but you know what, Ramsey, there's
not enough information on Reesa's pieces. Also a lot of
people know that story, but we're gonna include it anyway.
But more importantly, Ramsey's awesome. His suggestion was awesome. It
is awesome, Thank you, Ramsey, and it led us on
this wonderful trail to the business history of Reese's in general,
which is pretty fantastic. Well, and it's it's funny because
(03:34):
it's a history that was largely ignored starting in the
late seventies because of the company that would take over races.
Because well, we'll get there. I don't get that, we'll
get no spoilers jumping way ahead, Jimmy way, all right,
So let's start with that history, and it all begins
with the founder of the company. Oh and by the way,
(03:58):
you might occasionally here in this episode a little crinkly
noises because Ariel and I each have a Reese's Peanut
butter cup, a manager one, the kind you would get
at Halloween. It is so hard not to eat it
at this very second, I know I'm trying to hold
off myself. Okay, so start with the history. Harry Burnett
Reese is who we can thank for the Reese's Peanut
butter cup. He actually I have in my notes. He
(04:21):
had aspirations of becoming a real life Willy Wonka forty
years before Dahl would write that book. That's being a
little tongue in cheek facetious. But he was born in
Pennsylvania in eighteen seventy nine and by the year nine
he had married a woman named Blanche Edna Hyson, and
he started working as a farmer on the family farm
(04:44):
at Frosty Hill, which is near Muddy Creek Forks. Then
in my notes, I wrote, this makes me think that
this isn't one of the best spots in Pennsylvania based
on the name. I mean, if it's Frosty then the
mud is probably not like squishy, So bring Muddy Hill.
That's where my farm is. And he would end up
working several different jobs in his young adulthood, and he
(05:09):
was like, he got a reputation for picking up and
moving with his whole family multiple times in order to
pursue these opportunities. Eventually, he and his wife and now children,
of which he would ultimately have several sixteen intervals, would
settle in Hershey, Pennsylvania, which I've been to. Have you
(05:29):
been to Hershey? I have not. I have been to Pittsburgh. Yes,
that's it. Yeah, so my wife's from Pennsylvania and we've
been to Hershey several times. It's also where the Pennsylvania
Renaissance Festival takes place. I hear. That's fantastic is and
Hershey is obviously a monument to chocolate. Even back then,
Hershey's the the Chocolate Company was a thing. Yeah, but
(05:50):
that's that's not where Reese started in Hershey. He started
working at a dairy farm called the Round Barn in
like nineteen sixteen. But here's the thing, Round Barn owned
by Hershey. So yeah, he technically he was, but he
wasn't working straightly strictly for the chocolate tier. He was
(06:10):
working for the dairy farm. Yes, so he worked there
for a couple of years, but then Hershey's, in a
cost saving measure, closed that dairy farm in nineteen nineteen,
and so then Rees's went over to try and do
some other stuff, including create his own candy company. Now
(06:31):
that initial attempt was the R and R Candy Company,
and he was largely basing his his recipes off of
his mother's recipes, and they included things like chocolate covered
almonds and chocolate covered raisins, taking the things that kids
don't want to eat at Halloween and dipping them in chocolate. Yeah,
and uh, it did not end up becoming a huge success.
(06:55):
And I mean even at the time, like Hershey's was
already a dominant player in pocolate. We'll have to do
a full episode on Hershe's at some point. But when
you think of her She's, you think of hershey Bars,
and he's focusing it looks like on little I Can't
held candies. Yeah, he's looking for the stuff that would
be sold in like the big barrels at a general store.
Because this is also before you know grocery stores and
(07:15):
department stores are really a thing. Yeah, so our in
our candy company didn't do well, and so he rebranded.
He called the new company the Superior Chocolate and Confectionery Company,
which is superior to our and R Candy I suppose yep.
He tried to sell some stock in order to fund
this business, but this also did not take off, and
(07:37):
pretty soon he was closing the doors on that one,
and not too long after that he would go back
and work for her She's again, this time in the
shipping department, which where he was sneaking little chocolate covered
raisins into everybody's packages with a little note saying, if
you want more of these, cover Superior. Now. He did
(07:59):
not find the particularly engaging or interesting, but it was
paying the bills, and in the meantime, he continued to
create different recipes for his own candy, working out of
his basement's um hygienic basement candy. Well, here's the thing,
you know, I will eat basement candy, maybe everything but
(08:21):
bathroom candy. Okay, that's fair. Well, you know why he
was making his basement. It's because this is before air conditioning,
so the temperature would get too warm, especially during the
summer months. Like in summer they couldn't make chocolate at
all because the temperature would be so warm they could
never get the candy to set properly. It would always
be that kind of sweaty, melty stuff. So the basement
(08:46):
was the coolest room to work in, so you could
heat up the chocolate, mold it, and let it cool
and set there. So that's why he set up down there. Yeah.
So I think it's really cool that some of the
candy was he named after his kids, yes, right, yeah,
And not only that, but it was the successful stuff
that he was making. Yeah, so that this is what
(09:07):
would actually help establish him and convince him to make
a real go of it. Yet again, So do you
know the name of the candy bars? Well, I do, Jonathan,
because it's right here in our nose and frost. Okay,
let's not. Don't peel back the curtain too far. I'm sorry. Okay, No,
there's the Lizzie Bar, which was carmel and coconut covered
(09:27):
in chocolate. Sign me up. You know. I first read
it and I was like, m hmm, but I could
totally see mixing a Snickers in an almond in a
mound's bar, and I'd be happy, and I love coconuts
so much together with the caramel took me by surprise
for a little bit. And the other one was the
Johnny Bar, which is made from alasses. So I guess
similar to a sugar daddy, maybe, yeah, kind of yeah.
(09:49):
And so he had sixteen kids that I mentioned in total,
eight boys and eight girls. They tragically not all of
them would live to adulthood, but you know, he had
had so many kids, and every single history has a
similar joke about how the chocolate business was necessity because
(10:11):
of his large family. And uh, they had a great
advertising slogan that would come a little bit later down
the road, but I wanted to include it now. Arial
could you please deliver that slogan sixteen good reasons to
buy Reese's. Yep, they would have a picture of all
the kids lined up, so essentially saying exactly, buy candy
(10:33):
so we can feed these children. So, uh, this was
enough for him to be convinced to give another go
about actually starting a candy company of his own, because
these these chocolate bars named after his kids were starting
to see some success. And so once again he quit
his job at Hershey's and he founded the H. B.
(10:56):
Reese Candy Company in nineteen twenty three. And you know,
he was already selling candy at this point and that
was enough for him to actually make a living. So
now he was just creating the company to make that
his full time gig. Yeah. And the candies he was
making around the time where things like peppermint creams, encoded
dates and things like that still in the raisins and
(11:16):
almonds arena, and he, as you said he was, he
was trying to sell them in like the general stores
and the barrels. So he sold them on consignment to
local shops in Pennsylvania. And he had made enough money
to build a new house, probably because he ruined his
basement and his old one. That's an assumption by me, Ariel,
but I'm sticking to it. And also enough money to
(11:38):
build a factory. Yes, So now he's like hiring people
he's making he's making these candies in uh, in larger amounts.
And by hiring people, um, I think you can imagine
what much of his workforce was made up of his children,
which is almost the same thing that I don't know
if they would sing songs about, you know, being greedy
(11:59):
or chewing gum all the time, but they definitely would
work for him quite a bit. We'll get back to
the family issues a bit later. So in ninete, Reese
happened to fall into a conversation with a local shop
owner who was telling Reese, you know, my customers really
like these peanut butter cups that this other candy company,
(12:22):
this other candy maker is making. In your face, Reese, yeah,
so so peanut butter cups. Chocolate covered peanut butter cups
were already a thing. Okay, Reese had never made them,
but they were they were a known quantity. So Reese
did not invent the peanut butter cup um. And but
he was being told by the shop owner, the problem is,
(12:42):
this candy maker can't make enough of these peanut butter
these chocolate covered peanut butter cups to meet the demand
my customers have. They are always asking for them. So
do you think you could make some? And Reese wasn't
super crazy about this, just he didn't that was not
what he was really interested in doing. But he thought, well,
there's a demand, I should definitely try to meet that.
(13:04):
So he got to work and um, he started roasting
his own peanuts, which for a long time was like
the thing that Reese's would say, set their peanut butter
cups apart from everyone else's. Yeah, but that's because he
almost burned his peanuts. Yeah. Apparently, according to the histories,
(13:24):
there was a malfunction in the roasting equipment which over
roasted the peanuts almost to the point of burning them,
and then he ended up turning it into peanut butter anyway,
and it was a happy mistake because it produced a
peanut butter that people found particularly tasty. Yeah, but imagine
when you're trying to cook peanuts to a certain level
and then you overcook him, and now you have to
overcook him that exact amount every time to keep your
(13:48):
to maintain like a standard. Yeah. I ad meant that
once he fixed that roaster, he had to figure out
how to replicate the effect with a roaster that was
actually working properly. And then he covered the burnt peanut
butter in Hershey's chocolate. Yes, And this would be something
that is an interesting, interesting kind of sympatico relationship because
(14:11):
throughout his career Reese would use chocolate from Hershey's. He
would purchase the chocolate from Hershey's, and Hershey's would send
him the chocolate needed. He and her She had a
good working relationship. It's it's not uncommon for confectioners to
outsource their chocolate from other people. Yeah, and so this
was one of those cases where, uh, this was not
(14:33):
even a rivalry so much as it was like like
just two different companies doing business in the same area.
But they both realized there was enough room. Plus, I mean,
Hershey's was operating at a level far beyond what Reese
was doing at this point. So then he introduces the
peanut butter cup. That's not what they were called originally. No,
(14:54):
they were called penny cups. That's how much they cost,
one penny a cup. That's also that's also the same.
It's a good exchange rate. When you said one one
one cup of penny, or however you said it, I
just pictured someone like throwing pennies into a cup. That's
fair enough. That's fair enough, which you weren't incorrect. My
(15:17):
brain just went weird anyhow. Sorry. We actually have the
date that they debuted too. It was November. Are you certain,
because oftentimes dates are shaky, I mean sure enough to
put it into the notes that's super awesome. To be fair, yes,
the histories state November fift it could give or take
(15:38):
five years, but for once, we're not getting so many
conflicting reports on the date, so it's it's pretty spectacular.
So he originally sold these peanut butter cups in bulk
mixed up with all of his other candies in five
pound bags. But you know what, people like the peanut
butter cups better than the chocolate covered dates, and so
again Reese was not super thrilled with that. He he
(15:59):
was not a fan of the peanut butter cups, but
you got to give the people what they want. So
he would continue to make them, and eventually it would
take a couple of years, but eventually it got to
the point where he could make them solely on their
own and sell those as a separate item as opposed
to being one item in a five pound bag of
(16:22):
bulk candy. So they got popular enough where they could
stand out as a single item, which was unusual at
the time. And then we get to a brink moment. Yeah,
so this was a bring moment that was not unique
to Reese's. It was not something go ahead and unwrap
(16:44):
that candy I'm gonna I'm not gonna eat it. I'm
just unwrapping it. Okay, that's fair. She really, she literally is.
That's not that's not us doing sound effects. She really
did just do that anyway. So this bring moment was
a bring moment that happened to the entire world. This
is not something that was unique to Reese's and not
a moment would be if you're keeping track of what year.
It is the Great Depression, and it was almost enough
(17:06):
to bring the story to an end, and then we
would have two segments of nothing. But we've got a
little more to explain right after this break. So the
Great Depression hit, you are right of their areal. Yeah,
I'm your started before I'm done with this peanut butter. Okay,
(17:29):
I wasn't going to eat it, but um, it smelled
really peanut butter and good. I can taste those burnt peanuts. Okay,
I need another one, Well, this one's mine. Originally, guys,
I wanted to just bring this giant bag of rees
peanut butter cups and see how many I could eat
throughout the episode episode. But I'm sparing you all of
(17:51):
that smacking noise. If you want to take that challenge
on yourselves. Please do let us know how many you ate. Yes,
you can, but don't tell us how much you threw up.
Ariel will keep it tally and then as a reward,
will name whoever ate the most of the end. But
be honest. All right, we don't want you saying I
ate a thousand Reese's peanut butter it cups No, Okay,
(18:11):
let's get back to the story. The Great Depression really
hit Reese very hard, and he was so short on
cash that, according to the stories, he got to the
point where he wasn't able to pay his employees in money,
so he paid them in candies. I mean I would
be happy, I mean, but his employees were his kids, right.
(18:32):
Well know, yeah, that's that's you know, fun in theory,
but not very practical. Yeah, you can't pay your rent
in candy most of the time, and his employees complained
in The sheriff even came after him, and he went
into hiding. And yes, he kind of reminds me of
the Ozarks. Yeah, he ran off to hide at his
old family farm while the sheriff was looking for him.
(18:53):
So things were pretty grim, and he decided that in
order to to make it through the hard times that
he actually would go back to farming, especially in the
summer months, because again it was too warm to make
the candy, So he ended up putting his workers to
work doing stuff like canning vegetables, So people who had
(19:16):
been making chocolates were now canning, Like, maybe they'd make
those canned lama beans taste better. I like chocolate. I
would eat those. He also would end up in order
to keep his business afloat, and he secured several loans
to make sure everything was in operation. Now. Obviously, that
(19:40):
in itself meant that he was taking on a big
risk because now he had debt he needed to pay
off in addition to just making sure that he could
make ends meet, you know, day to day. Yeah, but
here's the thing, people still really liked his peanut butter cups.
I guess they brought him a little bit of joy
in the midst of all this financial turmoil. Yeah. Yeah,
it's one of those things where it was a luxury
(20:02):
that people were willing to pay for on occasion, and
it was relatively affordable. Yeah, it wasn't like it was
super expensive. So the peanut butter cups were incredibly popular
and kept him in business. And by n five, because
of that popularity, he had actually made enough money to
pay off all that debt. So it was only a
few years that he had this debt over him, and
(20:23):
then literally the peanut butter cup was what allowed him
to to get out from under it. Yeah, but you
know what, he still couldn't give up on those chocolate
covered dates, not for a while until World War te
was stubborn. Yes, so the Great Depression kept all of
his other like he was still making other types of candies.
(20:44):
But the World War Two was a different story because
during World War Two the United States government put strict
rationing on a lot of different staples, sugar exactly, and
so with sugar under this rationing, Reese was not going
to be able to make enough of the candies. However,
one thing that wasn't rationed was peanut butter, so that man,
(21:08):
he had plenty of peanut butter, and he could still
buy chocolate from Hershey's. Her she was still agreeing to
sell Reese chocolate, so that meant he could still make
the peanut butter cup. And ultimately he said, all right, well,
the only thing that makes sense is to just make
peanut butter cups, and it was a good decision. It
(21:29):
kept him in business. So he keeps on churning these
things out, and at this point he has um really
focused specifically on just making peanut butter cups. By the
mid nineteen fifties, UM it had gotten to the point
where they were going to need to expand again. They
were going to need to build essentially a new factory
(21:51):
that they had outgrown their old one, and UM they
decided that they were going to actually build this thing
and it was scheduled to open in nineteen fifty seven
like that. That was kind of the target of when
this would come online. But HB. Reese himself would not
live to see that come to pass. He would pass
(22:13):
away on May sixteenth, nineteen fifties, six one year before
the new facility would come online. Man, that's really sad.
But what's even sadder is the fact that he left
his company to his sons. He excluded his daughters from
his will, from his will, and then his not all
of his sons all I guess eight of them, six
(22:34):
of them, six of them, six of them at that
point wanted the company. So there was all of this
in fighting on whether they should sell it or keep it. Yeah,
the sons didn't all get along with each other, and
yet because of the will, they were each named two
different positions of authority in the in the company. So
get six people who don't like each other and then
(22:55):
tell them they have to lead a company together. You
can imagine that's not gonna smoothly. So yeah, there was
this whole thing about who, whether they should keep the company,
whether they should sell the company. They had built the
manufacturing facility. This was an interesting thing too, because it
shows how how Reese's was interesting in its marketing. I mean,
(23:19):
you know they had done this sixteen good reasons to
buy a resas. They had gone from marketing Reese's as
being sort of a hand dipped candy to now that
they have the new manufacturing facility saying untouched by human hands,
which also makes me think of Willy Wonka, which kind
of makes it go from like a little home good
field to a super technical candy of the future field. Yes, so,
(23:43):
by the time the nineteen sixties rolled around, it was
pretty obvious that her that Reese's sons were not going
to be running the company forever, at least not all
of them, and so this because some of them were
looking around at the possibility of selling the company off.
They looked specifically to her She because and her She
(24:05):
and her She had heard about it. Yeah, and her
She already had a stake in this candy. Yes, so
the company her She takes a look and says, all right, well,
will make you an offer. And this ended up being
a big point of argument amongst the Suns, And then
eventually they came to an agreement and they decided to
(24:26):
sell to her She's um and and the ones who
wanted to stay with the company became employees of her She's. Yeah,
some of the men joined the board of directors for
Her She's, and then the others kind of went their
own way, and it would become one of the best
selling candies out of Hershey's. That's because it's delicious, y'all. Yeah.
(24:47):
Now we're gonna skip ahead a bit in the story,
because I mean, ultimately the story is like, and they
kept making recus peanut butter cups, and people kept buying them,
and they kept eating them, and then they kept making
them and c even years pass and now we get
a very famous ad campaign which I remember from my childhood,
because it was still going when I was a kid.
(25:09):
But we're into the nineteen seventies now, and this was
a campaign that would ruffle some feathers among people who
knew Reese and who were familiar with the history of Rees's.
There was a guy named billings fuse, A a who
was a director at an ad firm that said, all right,
(25:30):
we're going to do an ad campaign where people are
going to accidentally create the combination of chocolate and peanut butter.
According to him, he was saying, people just aren't convinced
that chocolate and peanut butter is a good combination. Is crazy.
The whole reason that Reese started making them is because
the candy was selling out. Yeah, there was a demand,
and it had been in demand for for like four decades,
(25:53):
and they it was it was an obviously successful candy. Yeah,
I mean it was one of her She's best sellers too.
But for the basis of this ad campaign, they wanted
it to look like Hershey's had come up with this
brand new idea almost by accident. You just accidentally got
peanut butter and chocolate colliding together. Yes, And that's exactly
what the ad campaign was. It would be. It would
(26:14):
be all these different scenarios where someone's carrying like a
chocolate bar and someone else has got, like, you know,
a spoon of peanut butter as you normally would, and
then through happenstance, the to collide and you get some
variation of Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate,
Hey you got chocolate peanut butter, And they try and
(26:35):
they're like, say, chocolate and peanut butter. Who knew everybody? Yeah,
that's the thing everybody knew. I mean, I do have
friends who do not like chocolate peanut butter together, but
I have former friends who do not like chocolate. I
respect them. I don't understand it. It's okay if you
don't like peanut butter and chocolate together, we still love you, yea.
So maybe you could argue that this was their first
(26:57):
national ad campaign for Reese's peanut buttercups, really is the
first national ad campaign for Hershe's in general. So you
maybe you could argue that these particular chocolate covered peanut
butter cups were mostly known in the Northeast and the
regions around that where Hershey's was shipping this stuff, and
that maybe nationwide, it wasn't as big a deal, but
(27:19):
this changed that because whether you agreed with the ad
campaign or not, whether or not you were upset that
Hersy's was effectively erasing the history of this peanut butter
cup and therefore also of HB. Reese. The campaign was
a success and sales skyrocketed. Yes, okay, now we're going
(27:41):
to skip ahead to and her She's was working with
a peanut butter powder. Yes, this was different than the
peanut butter in the cups. Yes, they took all the
oil out of it. Yes, it's dry. Yes, And that
way they could mold it into shapes and use it
as baking chips and things like that. And then they
could cover it. And I was going to steal that
from and I'm jealous, so he would cover it. They'd
(28:05):
cover it in candy coating. And they had these powdered
peanut butter candy coated things that they needed to market
to push. You know what, we're gonna get back into that.
I need to take a break and fund another peanut buttercup.
I'm going to lick the paper. So this peanut butter
(28:30):
flavored powder that Hershey's had created had the consistency similar
to chocolate. So again, it's not the same stuff that
was in a Reese's peanut butter. You can say that again.
And it was it was meant to be used in
stuff like baking chips. Yeah, where you don't want the
oil because it will ruin the consistency of your batter exactly.
Aerial is by the way, in case you do not know,
(28:50):
this an incredible baker. I've only been able to sample
the stuff she's baked on a couple of occasions. It's
always phenomenal. I need to make some of my peanut
butter shortbread cookies. Yes, you do. So they introduced this
this candy coated peanut butter powder stuff in and um
(29:12):
they had already introduced a candy coated like chocolate years before.
But Eminem's had that market sewn up, so her she
has gotten out of that, which is of them. Yeah,
so in this case, they're like, well, this is different
because it's peanut butter, it's not chocolate. And they needed
a name for it, so they settled on the amazing
name Pebs. Pebs did not did not really strike anyone
(29:35):
as interesting. Um, As I mentioned, they had already had
a previous candy coated chocolate that was called the Hershey
Ets as a great name. Yeah, And then they realized
that there was a problem with the name Pebs. And
it wasn't that Pebs was not capturing the imagination. Skippy
has a peebe bites sort of product right now. The
(29:58):
problem that they read into was peb Ease would be
very hard for them to trademark. Yeah, So they needed
to come up with a different name so that they
could trade market and make sure that they protected their
their intellectual property. Yea. So they called them Reese's Pieces,
which I just want to say is a huge misnomer
because if you go to eat a Reese's Pieces expecting
the same wonderful flavor you get from a Reese's peanut
(30:20):
butter cup, You're going to be sorely disappointed. It is
a very different experience. It doesn't have that salty, mommy
peanut butter flavor. Yeah, and you're missing the oil too,
which does make a difference now and all of the chocolate.
There's no chocolate in Reese's Pieces, But also beyond that,
(30:41):
there's literally no connection to Reese's right, Like it wasn't
made by Reese. This was not This was not a
peanut butter powder that here. It has none of the
same ingredients. Really, yeah, woman, he's got peanuts, but but
not like the peanut butter exactly. So it's this is
where they ended up using Ee's name as a brand
(31:02):
of its own, rather than there's no connection to the
man Reese. But then, to be fair, this isn't really fair,
but to to illustrate why Hershey's had largely, you know,
erased Reese's history in their marketing. So the name really
didn't mean anything anyway. It was just a name. It
was it was it was something to grab people's attention.
(31:24):
If oh, I like this one product, so I'm gonna
like this other one too. It was a brand um
and it did really well at first. Yep. It was
like you know, brand new candy. So I got people's
attention and sales were pretty good. But then after that
initial burst of popularity, the sales kind of flagged a
little bit, which was problematic because Hershey's was investing in
(31:44):
new manufacturing facilities. Yeah right, so they really couldn't afford
to have declines in sales. It's not unusual to see
a new candy like come out the gate swinging and
then let's just mixing metaphors. But then, uh, I'd love
to see a horse come out of the gate swinging
there like, wow, that horse is angry and fast. No it,
(32:06):
But coming out of the gate going full tilt and
then slowing down, that's not unusual. But they were worried
that the rate of slowdown might be an indicator that
they could end up with a very medium, you know,
mediocre kind of performing candy. Yeah, they wouldn't make back
all of their investment into it. And so this is
where we get to eat. Yes, the opportunity of Et
(32:28):
the Extra Terrestrial. So am Bulow Productions was making this movie,
and they're different versions of this story. So there's a
lot of he said, she said kind of stuff out there,
and there's a lot of stuff where people are just
making assumptions. But we're gonna try and give the general
gist of what happened. Yeah, so, uh, Spielberg wanted the
(32:49):
main character, Elliott. Yeah, yeah, uh sorry we did that
to you guys, to use candy to basically get Et
the alien in to trust him. Yes, this is the
famous trail of candy that was lampooned in Family guy
with James Woods, as I called piece of candy candy, Yeah,
(33:12):
originally that candy. They wanted it to be Eminem's. Yes,
And so they went to Mars because another thing they
were hoping to do was do some product like actual
product placement, which was not common. Yeah, that was a
brand new idea really in the early nineties. The concept
being that hey, we're going to use your product front
and center in our movie, and in return, we will
(33:36):
get some form of support from you. In this case,
they were really looking at marketing support, like ad campaigns
that would tie into the movie and thus help promote
the film. They weren't looking for production costs, which is
what a lot of product placement does now. Adam Sandler movies, Yeah,
(33:56):
so many movies. I watched so many TV shows where
I'm light product placement, product place where are very conveniently
pointed straight at the camera, or certain shows will just
flat out they don't even try to hide it anymore.
They're just like commercial in the middle of the show. Anyhow,
we're getting off track. One of the story says that
the president of Mars, who owned Eminem's, didn't think the
film would be successful, and that's why he said, now. Yes.
(34:19):
There are other stories that say they were nervous about
any sort of movie about an alien because the movie
Alien had come out not too long ago and it
scared the pants off people, and so the thought was, well,
I don't want our candy to be associated with something
like that. Whatever the reason is, whether it's one of
those or something entirely different, what we do know is
(34:41):
Mars past on this opportunity. Then the next part of
the story goes that a VP at Amblin turned to
his son, his young son, and said what kind of
candy would be best to lure a e t out
into the open? If Eminem's isn't available, mart Move Amblin
VP yes, and his son said Reese's Pieces, which the
(35:04):
VP said, yeah, he had never heard of the candy before,
and then universal Slash Amblin would reach out to her
She's would essentially the same offer, although according to least
some stories, they actually shot a sequence using Reese's Pieces
before they even talked to her. She's and essentially said
(35:25):
here it is. Would you like to would you like
to be part of this? Other versions of the story
say no, no, no. Jack Dould, who as director of
New product development over at Hershey's, flew out, got to
see a bunch of very early stuff about ET, but
not like a finished sequence, and then was convinced that
(35:46):
this was gonna be a good idea and that they
should be on the ground floor. So he said, yes,
we will do that, and then he had to go
back to her She's and convince everyone at Hershey's that
it was a good Yeah, that we're going to spend
money on marketing for this film so that we can
also market our candy, and people were not It took
them a little bit. Yeah, they were not totally on board.
(36:06):
It was. It was actually a hard sell. Uh, there's
it's it's funny because there's some stories that say he
went to uh to his coworkers and he showed them
some early pictures of ET and they're all like, he's ugly.
And then it wasn't until they were able to watch
(36:28):
a finished cut of the movie that they were like,
oh as they cried their eyes out as any human
being with a beating Heartwood after watching ET certainly certainly,
which is why I don't watch it anymore because so beauty,
it's too beautiful. I think I saw it like virus.
It's too beautiful, But it was really successful. The sale
of Reese's pieces increased by six and that was early on.
(36:52):
There's some figures that have that as high as three.
So it was clear a great tie in. The marketing
campaign was a huge success. The sale of Reese's pieces
were so popular that actually outpaced the sale of Eminem's
during that same time. A positive brink. Yeah, this is
(37:14):
definitely one of those positive moments. And this is also
a moment where some people will point to it and
they'll say, man, Mars made a bone headed decision. Can
you believe that they passed on ET? Here's where I
want to be a little fair. There was no way
of knowing at the time that ET was going to
be a big hit. Steven Spielberg had made some great
movies already, he had made Jaws, he had made Close
(37:36):
Encounters of the third kind, but he was not yet
known as like a master filmmaker, and so there was
no assurance that ET was going to really work. So also,
you don't know if Mars even had the marketing budget
that year to to put towards something like that. So
there are a lot of a lot of factors that
(37:58):
could have fed into Mars say, know that aren't just
based on Oh well, that movie is never gonna work.
So I think one, it's important to remember where Reesis
came from. So thank you Ramsey for suggesting this, because
it's so much bigger than the Reese's Pieces story. But also, uh,
(38:19):
this history kind of tells us that, you know, when
you're hitting a hard time, look at what's working and
invest in that. Yes, yeah, it's it's an important thing
to say, Like, I could keep going with all my
different lines of business, but if the if that's going
to be a real big challenge and there's one specific
(38:39):
part that's doing really well, maybe it's best for me
to just focus all my efforts there, at least for
the time being. Um. Another thing I would mention is
that Mars did get Eminem's into et in a way
because in the novel version of et Et it's still
Eminem's because the novel was written before the deal filter.
(38:59):
I didn't know there was a novel. Of course, there's
a novelization of the film, and in that one it's
Eminem's not Reese's Pieces. Yeah, well we have a we
have a fun fact here. Yep, yep, we have. If
you've ever actually enjoyed or endured Reese's pieces, then you
may have noticed that there's not as many colors as
(39:22):
you might find in say a bag of Eminem's. There
in fact, only three colors. There's orange, and there's yellow,
and there's brown, and you're gonna get way more of
one of those than the other two, which is orange. Yes,
the orange makes up of all the candy pieces that
are made, and then the other fift is divided evenly
(39:42):
between yellow and brown. It makes sense because yellow and
brown is a color candy. But when you think Reces,
you think orange trappers. So that's that's why if you
ever get Reese's and you open up a bag and
you're like, man, there are a lot of oranges in
this one, well, it's because they make twice as many
a man. I hate when I get oranges inside my
bags of can d okay, And I also want to clarify,
(40:03):
and then we're gonna let you guys go, because we
know we've gone a little bit long that I don't
endure Reese's pieces. I just needed to know the first
time I tried them that it wasn't chocolate covered Reese's
peanut butter It would have been so much better if
I had been prepared. Yeah, I well, you know, I
had a lot of Reese's pieces when I was a kid,
because again I was I loved et and that marketing
(40:25):
totally worked on me. But these days, if I'm going
to have something with Reese's name on it, it's going
to be a peanut butter cup me too, because they
are amazing and I probably should not have eaten the
one that I had. I'll just have to get on
the treadmill for another. Like our fine. Yeah, so well,
Jonathan's on the treadmill. If this story has inspired you
(40:46):
to think of topics that you'd like to hear us
talk about, you can email us at Feedback at the
Brink Podcast dot show and let us know. Yeah. You
can also visit our website, The Brink Podcast dot Show.
That's where you're gonna find more information about the two
of us, as well as an archive of all of
our past episodes. Yep, and if you like listening to
the Brink, please tell your friends, you know, give us
(41:07):
a positive review. We'd really appreciate it. Yeah, share the
love because we're having a lot of fun covering these
and Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. All right, Well until next time.
I Am Spooky Jonathan Strickland, I Am Creepy aerial cast
I'm like the paper Business. On the Brink is a
(41:32):
production of I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. For
more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Business on the Brink News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Ariel Kristen Kasten
Show Links
AboutPopular Podcasts
1. Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
2. Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
3. Crime Junkie
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.