Joseph Rowntree (24 May 1836 – 24 February 1925)

Joseph Rowntree was born and brought up in the grocery business. His father owned a shop in Scarborough.

Joseph left school at fourteen with just five year’s education and started working for his father – although he would spend time away in London as an apprentice.

Subsequently, Joseph took over the running of the company with his brother John Stephenson Rowntree.

From 1859 he ran the family shop buy ten years later in 1869, he joined another brother, Henry Isaac Rowntree.

Henry owned a chocolate factory in York and when Henry died in 1883, Joseph became owner of the company.

Joseph employed his own progressive ideas in setting up and then running a new factory that opened in 1881.

He was known as an enlightened business man who did much to improve workplace conditions.

Rowntree’s company expanded from thirty to in excess of 4000 employees by the end of the nineteenth century.

Although the business was always well-managed, the real brand building would begin in the 1930s, after the Rowntree family ceased to have managerial control.

A merger with John Mackintosh & Co. in 1969 was followed by take-over by Nestlé in 1988.
Joseph Rowntree (24 May 1836 – 24 February 1925)

Milton Snavely Hershey

Milton S. Hershey was born on September 13, 1857 in a stone farmhouse on what is now the campus of Milton Hershey School in the town of Derry Church, Pennsylvania.

The family was constantly on the move, Milton received little formal education or continuing in his study. 

Leaving school at age thirteen, he got a job learning to run a printing press but he was fired later. His mother found him a job at Joseph Royer’s ice cream and candy shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Following a four year apprenticeship, in 1876, Hershey opened a taffy shop in Philadelphia, which failed six years later.

Then, in 1886 Hershey opened the Lancaster Caramel Company which became a tremendous success. Within four years Hershey was hailed as one of Lancaster’s most successful citizens.

With financial assured, Milton Hershey was able to purse new interest. He began travelled abroad. Hershey hired chocolate makers and launched the Hershey Chocolate Company after visited Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, where he was fascinated by the exhibit of a German supplier of chocolate making equipment.

In 1900, Hersey began manufacturing milk chocolate candies while he continued to revise formula, which he continued to perfect through 1905.

Hershey and his wife were childless, so together they founded a school for needy orphans, which is now recognized as one of the most generous of its kind in the country.

Following his wife premature death in 1915 , Hershey donated an estimated $60 million in trust to the school. He died on October 13, 1945.
Milton Snavely Hershey