History of Reese

The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were invented by Harry Burnett Reese. He began making confectionary products in the basement in his home in Hershey, PA. Mr. Reese had worked for Milton Hershey and bought his chocolate from his former employer. When the Great Depression hit, Harry concentrated on only making peanut butter cups in his factory because they did not need as much sugar, which was a shortage at the time. Hershey acquired the Reese Company in 1963 for $23.3 million.

In 1969 the first advertising campaign for Reese’s took place. Promotional advertising quickly and effectively emphasized the new bond between Hershey’s and Reese’s. The tag line “Two great tastes that taste great together” was created. The commercials focused on the collision concept. The first commercial contained a construction worker who had fallen into a manhole saying “you got peanut butter in my chocolate”. This “manhole” campaign became ill-fatedly named as the “sewer campaign”. However, Reese’s sales tripled in a year.

Hershey Foods Corporation was against doing any kind of large-scale advertising for a long time, and as one of the nation's original candy companies, they could rely on their brand name. Instead, the company focused on solidifying its distribution networks and convincing supermarket owners that customers heavily consumed their products.

In 1973 Hershey introduced a new promotion featuring various product characters to greet the visitors at Hersheypark and Chocolate World. The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup character promoted the brand while still upholding the family fun concept of the park.

Since 1987, the candy's ads have shown the novel approaches people from different backgrounds have for eating peanut butter cups and ending with the tagline that "there's