Nonfiction Book Reviews

Note: Joel Glenn Brenner is a woman, and there should be a umlaut above the “e” in her first name, although I don’t have a clue of how to produce one of those on my keyboard. Just so you weren’t too confused by me referring to a “Joel” as a girl…

I was checking a patron out at the front desk when I saw The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars by Joel Glenn Brenner in the stack. Intrigued, I put the book on hold as soon as the patron walked out the door.

When the patron returned it, I eagerly started reading and boy am I glad that I did.  I will never look at the candy aisle at the store the same.  Before reading this book, I was rather clueless about the chocolate world, and in fact, if asked, I would have said that Hershey and Mars had merged together and were the same company now.  (Don’t ask me why I thought that, but that’s what I believed.)

Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong if I tried.  There is an intense rivalry between Hershey and Mars, akin to the one between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, and actually, Hershey and Mars don’t play well together.  At all.  But that isn’t always how it was: In the beginning, Hershey helped Mars get started, and provided all of the chocolate for Mars for years.

Then to get even more bizarre, I found out what M&M stands for.  If you ask a Mars worker, they’ll tell you, “The owner liked his name Mars so much, he used it twice!” ie, it’s Mars & Mars.  Although it’s a good line, it’s not true, and in fact the second M stands for Murrie, the last name of the president of Hershey.

I told you it was bizarre.

This book was fascinating for me - I love to learn, I love chocolate, and Ms. Brenner is very adept at weaving in interesting tidbits and making it read more like a novel than a dry economics book on how these two companies came to be where they are.  She is a former newspaper reporter for the Washington Post, and it shows - she has a great writing style.

Here are some of the more interesting tidbits:

• The secrecy is so strict at Mars that when their machinery breaks down and they have to hire an outside company to come fix it, they meet the mechanic at the door, blindfold him, walk him through the plant to the machine, take off the blindfold, let him do his job, then blindfold him again to walk him back out. All very politely, of course.
• Because Mars is a privately held company, they are not required to reveal anything about anyone to anybody they don’t want to.  If you call Mars and ask for the name of the president of the company, the secretary will say very politely, “We don’t give out that information” and click! hang up the phone on you.
• The men who started each company (Hershey and Mars) struggled an incredible amount before becoming successful.  Both of them lost their shirts multiple times before finally making it.  The author goes through the story of each man quite in-depth, and I felt like I was reading the biography of each man, along with the general story of the companies themselves.
• After the death of founder Milton Hershey, the Hershey company was mismanaged so badly that they started to sink, and quickly.   A small example of the problem: they kept track of what they were selling by counting the cases - they sold X amount of 6 packs, Y amount of 12 packs.  A 6 pack of what, they didn’t know.  They didn’t differentiate between a Hershey bar and a Kit Kat bar.  They simply knew that all together, they had sold X amount of 6 packs.  Which is an insane way of doing business.  This has changed since then.
• Mars sells very little peanut butter candy because the owners hate peanut butter. I don’t blame them (I hate peanut butter too!) but I do think that it’s a strange reason to make a financial decision.  Then again, not having to explain their decisions to anyone isone of the biggest reasons they have stayed a privately owned company.
• The Hershey company is the sole supporter of one of the largest and richest orphanages in the world.  Philanthropy was one of the guiding principles of Mr. Hershey’s life, although his dream of a Utopia didn’t play out like he wanted it to.

I could go on and on, but I don’t want to ruin the book by saying too much.  I will say this: If someone had sat down and tried to come up with two completely different stories of how a chocolate company came into being, they couldn’t have done better than the two stories you hear here.  Mars and Hershey are diametrically opposite in every way except for the fact that both companies make chocolate.  It really was a great story.

I also enjoyed the fact that Brenner focuses on more than just Hershey and Mars - she also interviews and talks about other candy companies in the US and around the world.  It gives you a great perspective on the candy world.

The only part that I didn’t like is that I felt that Brenner tended to go on and on about uninteresting things at certain points of the book, stuff that a good editor would have chopped out.  It was definitely longer than it needed to be, and I found myself skimming a few times.

Overall, I think it’s worth 4.25 out of 5 stars.  If you’re interested in economics or are a chocolate lover, you’ve got to check this book out.  I promise you, trying to pick out a candy bar at the grocery store will become a whole different experience after having read it.

Hava