Reese's cups were invented by a man Hershey had laid off
When Milton Hershey closed the Round Barn dairy in 1919, its manager, H. B. Reese, lost his job. He started making sweets in his own kitchen business, coating peanut butter in his old employer's chocolate. The cups sold for a penny. Today the brand pulls in about $3.1 billion a year for Hershey.
Reese, a former dairy farmer who had also worked as a shipping foreman for Hershey, set up the H. B. Reese Candy Company in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in 1923. The peanut butter cups, dated to November 15, 1928, were first sold as Penny Cups for their one-cent price. They outsold everything else he made, so he eventually dropped his other lines and concentrated on them.
After Reese died in 1956, his six sons ran the firm until July 2, 1963, when they folded it into Hershey through a tax-free swap of shares. By 1969 the cups were Hershey's best-selling product. The brothers' 666,316 original shares have since multiplied into 16 million, worth over $4.4 billion in 2026 and paying about $92.9 million a year in dividends. Reese's still operates as a separate subsidiary, partly because its plant workers, unlike those at the main Hershey factory, are not unionised. The same subsidiary makes Kit Kat bars for the American market.
The scale is striking. In 2012 Reese's was the top candy brand in the United States, with $2.603 billion in sales, and only about 2.8 percent of its revenue came from abroad. In American convenience stores in 2017 it was 62 percent bigger than its nearest rival and took over 47 percent of seasonal sales across Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween and Christmas. The King Size pack, launched in 1987 and slimmed in 1991, was the single best-selling confection item.
Recipes have not stood still. In 2026 Brad Reese, the founder's grandson, publicly complained that the cups had changed. Hershey's chief executive, Kirk Tanner, later confirmed that a chocolate coating compound had replaced real chocolate on several Reese's products and promised a return to classic recipes by 2027. Spin-offs have ranged from an 8-ounce giant cup introduced in 2011 to a banana creme version honouring Elvis Presley.
Source: Reese's Peanut Butter Cups
