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Many of the most important institutions in Central Pennsylvania have ties to the Hershey Company. The best theme park is Hersheypark. If you or your kid have a tough-to-figure-out illness, you go to the Penn State Hershey Medical Center. The Milton Hershey School is a pre-K to 12th grade private school serving low-income students. The students live on campus and everything is free: Meals, housing, medical care, and extracurricular activities. All of that, and everything from Hershey PA’s Hershey Kiss capped streetlights to the Hersheypark Stadium (where I saw Creed on their Human Clay tour) could look a lot different if it weren’t for one guy and his name isn’t Milton Hershey
Before Milton Hershey built a milk chocolate empire, he made a small fortune starting the Lancaster Caramel Company after several failed candy-related ventures. When he sold the company in 1900, he kept the rights to a subsidiary, the Hershey Chocolate Company. At the time, chocolate in America wasn’t what we are used to today. It was a bitter baking chocolate, or a powder used for drinking or coating candy. Hershey had tasted European milk chocolate, seen its popularity there, and believed it was the future. He believed in it so much that he bought 1,200 acres of farmland in the middle of nowhere in Central Pennsylvania for a factory. People called him crazy.
Hershey had a bigger problem than what people thought of him — he hadn’t cracked the code to mass-produce milk chocolate. Specifically, he still needed to figure out how to condense milk so it would mix with the other ingredients properly.
At the time, Hershey had a milk chocolate product, but it spoiled quickly and couldn't be sold outside of Lancaster. The Swiss had mastered the process but weren’t sharing their secrets. Hershey got to work with his team figuring out how to condense milk while the factory was being built. They worked long hours heating milk, adding sugar, cleaning up the failed experiment, and doing it again the next day.
The chocolate factory was taking shape, one of the 150 feet tall smokestacks was nearly finished, and the walls were going up. Hershey still hadn’t discovered the proper way to make sweetened condensed milk. “It appeared that the men building the plant would finish before the recipe was found,” writes Michael D’Antonio in his biography of Hershey.
Enter John Schmalbach.
Schmalbach was an employee from Hershey’s factory in Lancaster. He arrived on site in the evening and got to work that night, slowly heating the milk and sugar until he had a mixture that worked with the other ingredients. It took time to verify Schmalbach's process, but in less than a day he had discovered the breakthrough. Schmalbach’s process for condensing milk was different from what the Swiss were doing, which made it easier to manufacture, and it had a long shelf life. However, the fermented milk fat gave Hershey’s chocolate a hint of a sour aftertaste that has defined American chocolate ever since (Europeans say American chocolate tastes like vomit, but honestly there’s nothing we could do to make them happy).
As far as I know, there are no statues of John Schmalbach, and no tree-lined avenues bearing his name, and I get it. The amount of experimenting and hard work that came before and after Schmalbach’s insight is immense. It takes a lot of ordinary straightforward work to get an idea from its start to the finish line, but you need an Oddballs insight at key moments along the way.