The Emperors Of Chocolate Essay, Research Paper

In The Emperors of Chocolate, Jo?l Glenn Brenner reveals the bitter legal

and marketing fights, espionage, deception, obsessive secrecy, and personality

clashes that dominate Hershey and Mars – and the candy industry as a whole.

Milton Hershey and Forrest Mars Sr. were both great business men. They ran

their businesses in a high degree of opposition. They each had their own strong

and weak point in the companies. Many national and local corporations have

modeled their own businesses in the same fashion. The Emperors of Chocolate

shows how both Mr. Hershey and Mr. Mars are notable philanthropists and

extraordinary businessmen who many people admire and respect.

Milton Hershey was a magnanimous philanthropist who spent hundreds of

millions of dollars and hours to create a town and orphanage to fulfill his

altruistic dreams. Forrest Mars Sr. was a short-tempered perfectionist who

yelled at anyone who failed to meet his standards. Hershey experimented and

took chances in his company whereas, Mars was much more serious and relied

more on statistics. ?What made Forrest?s blood rush was the thrill of mastering

new opportunities and taming uncharted worlds,? the author writes. ?Like Milton

Hershey, he was driven by his visions; but where Milton Hershey saw utopia,

Forrest Mars saw conquest.? Forrest Mars Sr. and Milton Hershey turned their

two companies from small mom-and-pop operations into international forces,

over the last century. While they may have started small, their products – Mars?

Snickers and M&M?s and Hershey?s milk chocolate bars and Kisses – are

ubiquitous.

The companies are completely contradictory of each other. Mars was

obsessed with having everything and everyone in a clean, neat, and orderly

manner. Mars? factories? floors were scrubbed every forty-five minutes. Every

night before the workers went home every bit of machinery had to be spotless

and shining. Milton focused on more of the way his chocolate tasted and make

new and more candies. Mars Inc. has spent million of dollars on marketing their

new products trying to push, to sell, the tons of candies has it produced.

Hershey, effortlessly, didn?t even have a marketing department until the late

1960?s. Overall, both companies are run with remarkable precision but, they

differ where their strengths and weaknesses lie. Milton Hershey and Forrest

Mars Sr. are model businessmen. Their companies, Hershey Food Corporation

and Mars Incorporated, have inspired many other people to start businesses and

model their business after one or the other.

I would do the same in starting my own business, but I would use both

men and companies as standard. Combined, they would be the ultimate candy

conglomerate dominating the candy industry. I would use the ingenuity of

Hershey and the business sense of Mars to create an enormously vast candy

conglomerate. I think there is no comparison of the two men and their

companies. They are both on the same level of preeminence. If you combine

their morals and ideas, you would fill in the weak links and strengthen their

already strong work ethics.

After years of competition, what began as small family – owned

businesses have grown into multi-billion dollar industrirs increasingly dominated

by corporate leviathans, fighting for shelf space and swallowing their smaller

competitors.

The Emperors of Chocolate was a very good book full of interesting, little

facts of the elaborate world of chocolate production and sales. The book depicts

the industry as a secret, underground world of espionage in which it actually is.

I think the progression of the chapters are supposed to take the reader from the

past to the present, but the constant switching between Hershey and Mars from

chapter to chapter is disconcerting and makes for a disjointed read. However, it

is still an interesting story and makes me crave chocolate while I’m reading!