For the grandson of the inventor of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, all it took was one bite of a Valentine’s Day Reese’s Mini Hearts to leave him, well, heartbroken.
“It didn’t taste like milk chocolate,” Brad Reese told NBC News. “It tasted cheap.”
Reese said he looked at the front of the package and saw the words “peanut butter,” but not the words “milk chocolate.” And when he flipped the bag over and read the list of ingredients he was, as he put it, “horrified.”
Hershey’s, which makes the beloved butter cups and seasonal spin-offs like mini-hearts, had replaced the milk chocolate with a chocolate-flavored coating “that definitely was not chocolate,” according to Reese.
Make Reese's Great Again
“For most of my life I ate at least one Reese’s Butter Cup per day, and sometimes something seasonal like a Reese’s heart or a Reese’s Christmas tree,” Reese, 70, said. “But this was inedible. I threw it in the garbage.”
Then Reese, who is so enthralled with his grandfather’s sweet creation that he often ventures outside clad in orange and brown Reese’s jerseys, and who for 25 years has used his personal website to promote peanut butter cups and his family history, took a closer look at the ingredients on other Hershey’s candies that descend from his grandfather’s inventions.
“You know the Reese’s Mini Eggs they sell at Easter? No milk chocolate in that,” Reese said.
Same goes for Reese’s Pieces, which were introduced in 1978 but really took off after they were featured in the 1982 movie “E.T. the Extra-Terrestial.”
So Reese posted a link to a letter he wrote to Todd Scott, who does the corporate branding for Hershey’s, on his LinkedIn page. And he revamped his web site, which includes a photograph of a brown baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Make Reese’s Great Again.”
Reese invoked the name of his grandfather, H.B. Reese, who invented the iconic peanut butter cup in 1928 and started a candy company that produced them until 1963, when his sons sold the firm to The Hershey Company.
“My grandfather,” Reese wrote, “built REESE’S on a simple, enduring architecture: Milk Chocolate + Peanut Butter.”
“But today, REESE’S identity is being rewritten, not by storytellers, but by formulation decisions that replace Milk Chocolate with compound coatings and Peanut Butter with peanut-butter style cremes across multiple REESE’S products.”
That letter went viral.
“Now everybody wants to talk with me except Hershey,” said Reese. “Nobody from the company has called me.”
'Product recipe adjustments'
Hershey spokesperson Allison Mason insisted that the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups “are made the same way they have always been." But she conceded that, as the company has expanded its “Reese’s product line,” it has tinkered with the original recipe.
“We make product recipe adjustments that allow us to make new shapes, sizes and innovations that Reese’s fans have come to love and ask for, while always protecting the essence of what makes Reese’s unique and special: the perfect combination of chocolate and peanut butter,” Mason said via email.
Mason also confirmed that the Valentine’s Day Reese’s Mini Hearts don’t have the milk chocolate designation on the front of the packaging, because the candies actually have a chocolate-flavored coating.
And because the term is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration it can’t legally be referred to as milk chocolate.
