| 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!
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