Milton Hershey (1857-1945)
Filed under the name Milton · February 20, 2026
Milton Hershey built one of the world's most famous chocolate companies and then used a genuinely enormous chunk of that fortune to found a school for underprivileged children, which is the part of his story that actually gets me, more than the chocolate itself, though I love a good chocolate story as much as anyone in my profession. Running a small business myself, I know how easy it would be to hoard whatever margin you finally manage to build after years of thin ones, and how much harder, and rarer, it is to actively give a meaningful chunk of it away once you've got it. My own bakery nearly closed twice, and both times it was community generosity, not my own resources, that pulled it through, so I have a particular soft spot for people who build something successful and then turn around and pour real support back into a community that needs it. Hershey apparently understood that a fortune built off of other people's sweet tooth owed something back to people who needed more than sugar.