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Orange is all but synonymous with Halloween. You have pumpkins, trick-or-treating baskets, costumes featuring a certain NBA team or the soccer team from a certain European country. And you’ll see it stacked highest in checkout aisles across the country: Halloween is Reese’s season. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were the top Halloween candy in Instacart’s and DoorDash’s order data last year, and about a third of the season’s candy sells in the final week.
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, for those among us who live under a rock and missed the “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter” commercials that ran for years starting in the 1970s (in one, bizarrely, a woman walks down the street eating peanut butter straight from the jar), have been around for nearly a century. The inventor, H.B. Reese, a former dairy farmer and shipping foreman for Milton Hershey, mixed simple chocolate and peanut butter and started selling candy out of his home. They quickly exploded in popularity, and to this day, that orange wrapper is all but synonymous with the candy.
For years, parents would look through a child’s Halloween haul and attempt to allot a portion or else “your teeth will fall out.” Other times, parents were alleged to take the “good ones” from their children’s loot, and objectively, among those reserved would be a Reese’s product.
But that was until recently, when debates over whether the recipes have changed have caused some connoisseurs of the orange-wrapped concoction to question their taste: Did they really like this stuff as a kid? Or did the recipe actually change? These questions culminated earlier this year in a public spat between H.B. Reese’s grandson and the company that bought his grandfather’s invention: The Hershey Company.
‘Hershey’s killing Hershey’
In a retirement community in West Palm Beach, Fla., Brad Reese, 71, has spent eight months accusing the Hershey Co. of cheapening the candy his grandfather invented. In Hershey, Pa., where the cups are still made, his cousin Becky Hilgers speaks for the rest of the family, and she wants him to stop.
“Hershey’s killing Hershey,” Brad Reese told Fortune. “This is not the Hershey company. It’s not the H.B. Reese candy. It’s not my company. My grandfather founded it. It is a total imitation. It’s a fraud.”
“I’m not sure what motivates him,” Hilgers said, “but he periodically does this.”
Between them stands Hershey. The company has conceded that it changed the coating on some Reese’s products and says it will change them back in 2027, and those changes came before its current leadership took over. It says Brad Reese, who has never worked for the company, doesn’t understand how a global candy business operates. And it pointed to its third-quarter earnings, released Thursday, as evidence of how much people still love Reese’s.
A brand worth a quarter of a company
Hershey has a repertoire of products, from classics like Kisses and its milk chocolate bars to Kit Kats and Almond Joys. But Reese’s stands apart from the rest of the lineup in sheer volume. It became the company’s top seller in 1969 and has stayed there ever since. While Hershey doesn’t break out sales by brand, Reese’s is its flagship, bringing in $3 billion a year, or roughly a quarter of the company’s sales, according to a person familiar with Hershey’s operations.
The family’s stake started in 1963, when H.B. Reese’s six sons merged his company into Hershey. Hershey exchanged 666,316 shares of its stock for the Reese company, according to Hershey’s 1963 annual report, a deal worth about $23 million at the time.
Not every branch of the family kept them. “Some people hung on to their money more than others,” Hilgers said. She declined to go further. “We were all fortunate and blessed to share in the success of my grandfather. I’ll just put it that way.” Brad Reese was 7 when the company was sold. He declined to say whether he holds Hershey stock.
The Valentine’s Day letter
The fight began on Feb. 14, colloquially known as the holiday when absent-minded partners rush to the local pharmacy to grab a heart-shaped box of chocolates as a last-minute reprieve. That day, Reese opened a bag of Reese’s Unwrapped Mini Hearts, threw them out, and posted an open letter on LinkedIn. The label, he said, read only “chocolate candy” and peanut butter crème, not milk chocolate and peanut butter.
“How does The Hershey Co. continue to position Reese’s as its flagship brand, a symbol of trust, quality and leadership, while quietly replacing the very ingredients (Milk Chocolate + Peanut Butter) that built Reese’s trust in the first place?” he wrote.
It found an audience that had been waiting for it. “I had one recently, and it tasted gross and waxy,” one user wrote on X. Another wrote, “I believe this, they don’t taste the same, and there’s an aftertaste they tastes chemical yuck,” while a third: “Goodbye Hersheys forever. You had to cut corners on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Justins is my new favorite. They still use real peanut butter. I read labels, but I trusted these guys. My mistake.” When Hershey later announced it would switch back, the comments spread to Reddit. “I tried a Reese’s yesterday for the first time in years and I thought I got a bad one or something. Nope, they’re just terrible now,” someone commented, while another wrote: “Sorry guys, lost me as a customer. I’d rather pay more for something of quality once-in-awhile than buy your shit that’s constantly losing ingredients over time until you get caught and put them back and then start the cycle over again.”
Hershey’s first answers were brief. In February, the company acknowledged some recipe adjustments made to create new shapes, sizes and innovations, while a spokesperson said the peanut butter cups “are made the same way they always have been.” Reese says that answered a question he hadn’t asked, since he wrote about the hearts, not the cups. “They hijacked the conversation,” he told Fortune. “I’ve gotten zero response from the Hershey company. They’ve been totally radio silent.”
A change was made, but not that one
Hershey hasn’t denied making some changes, but the company is adamant the classic taste is still there (if you get the right product).
The classic cups have not changed, the company says. That covers the two-, three- and four-cup packs, king size, and seasonal shapes like pumpkins. What did change were the extensions: foil-wrapped molded shapes sold at Valentine’s Day and Easter, Reese’s Minis, Reese’s Thins, and Reese’s Sticks.
Those moved to a cocoa butter equivalent coating, which by law must be labeled “chocolate candy” rather than milk chocolate. Such coatings swap some or all of the cocoa butter for vegetable oils, and they cost less. Stick formats like Take5 and Fast Break have used them for years, the Hershey insider told Fortune.
The “crème,” Hershey says, is a labeling matter. The federal standard for what can be called peanut butter was set decades ago. Formats other than the original 1928 cup use “crème” because their fillings are either thicker, to hold a shape, or thinner, to line a stick.
Hershey’s biggest defense is timing: It’s difficult to change an ingredients list, the company says, and every change goes through consumer testing. Current CEO Kirk Tanner, who spent decades at PepsiCo and about 17 months as CEO of Wendy’s, arrived in August 2025, after West African harvests failed and cocoa had already hit record prices. Hilgers, whose daughter works for Hershey, said the company was already planning to change the recipes back in the summer of 2025, months before Brad Reese’s letter. Tanner has said he made the call shortly after he took over.
But the letter still left an impact on the company and its public reception. Six weeks later, at its March 31 investor day, Hershey said all Hershey’s and Reese’s offerings would be made “consistent with their brand’s classic milk and dark chocolate recipes” by 2027. Tanner told Bloomberg the change touches less than 3% of Reese’s products. The molded hearts for Valentine’s Day 2027 are already running on the classic cup recipe, according to the person familiar with its operations, and Minis, Thins and Sticks will follow next year.
‘It’s a stall’
But Brad Reese believes none of it.
“It’s a brilliant publicity, public relations stunt,” he said. “I haven’t won anything because it’s total bunk. They’re not going back to the original recipe.”
“They could go back to the original recipe in three days,” he said. “They’re just kicking the can down the road, hoping that what I brought up would blow over. It’s a stall.”
To Hershey, Reese’s assertions reflect a lack of experience with how candy gets made. “Making and evolving products within a global snacking portfolio involves far more than a single decision and takes time,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “Each decision moves through extensive consumer testing and requires careful coordination across sourcing, manufacturing, equipment and packaging, with packaging changes alone taking six to eight months.”
Still, Reese seized on a line Hershey has used since the investor day: that every ingredient “earns its place.”
“The original Reese’s recipe doesn’t have to earn anything,” Reese said. “It created the number one candy brand in the United States and Canada.”
“Did consumers say, ‘Look, we’re tired of eating milk chocolate. We want to eat vegetable oil’?”
‘Like watching baby seals being clubbed’
Reese, who spared no harsh words for Hershey’s leadership, said the company’s recent purchases of snack brands, such as LesserEvil, were evidence of a strategy built on cutting corners and stacking up names.
“Watching Hershey buy a consumer packaged good company that’s backed by private equity is like watching baby seals being clubbed.”
And he says the company is borrowing its founder’s reputation, including through HERSHEY, the film about Milton Hershey that opens Nov. 25. “They’re hiding behind the heritage of Mr. Hershey, but it’s not the Hershey company anymore,” he said.
In a statement to Fortune, the company stood by its leadership, reiterating that the recipe changes were made before Tanner and others were put in charge, and that people making such allegations had “no affiliation with our company” and that their comments lack “direct knowledge or experience.”
“Our executive team brings deep [consumer packaged goods] experience, complemented by long-tenured commercial and operational expertise throughout Hershey,” a company spokesperson said. “CEO Kirk Tanner and the team are focused on making superior snacks, listening to consumers and evolving our portfolio to meet their changing tastes and preferences.”
Reese has found company outside the one that bears his last name. His website features a video with MrBeast promoting Feastables peanut butter cups, a direct competitor. Earlier this year, Mars ran an ad for its Snickers Peanut Butter line built around a focus group made up entirely of people named Reese.
“If Mars came out with a peanut butter cup, they would be an instant competitor,” Reese said, “and I think Hershey would be toast.”
A tough Halloween
The candy business has bigger problems this fall. Candy prices are up 44% over five years, about twice the rate of grocery prices overall. Cocoa fell to $3,241 a ton in March, then climbed again after the Iran war disrupted Africa’s fertilizer supplies. Halloween candy sales fell 6.7% in the month ending Oct. 17, according to NielsenIQ data reported by the AP.
Hershey shares hit a 52-week high of $239.48 earlier this year and have fallen about 30% since. Reese ties that to his campaign. Hershey has blamed weaker volume on shoppers pulling back after price increases.
Hershey’s third-quarter results, released Thursday, showed the strain of higher prices. The company charged about 13% more for its North American candy in the quarter, and the amount it sold fell about 11%. Hershey’s U.S. candy sales in stores rose less than 1% over the 12 weeks ended Sept. 27, and its market share slipped. “Our second-half demand creation initiatives are gaining momentum, even as consumers grow more cautious,” Tanner said.
A family food fight
In April, after Reese called the 2027 plan a stunt on NewsNation, Hershey gave Fox Business a statement from the Reese family. The family had “no involvement in, nor do we support” his claims, it said.
Hilgers, whose mother was H.B. Reese’s youngest daughter and the last of his children to die, says she and the cousins she’s in touch with “are all on the same page.”
“I don’t think the integrity of the piece of candy has changed so drastically that it doesn’t taste good and people aren’t buying it,” she told Fortune. “It’s the most recognizable brand that Hershey Company has. We’re still very proud of the piece of candy that our grandfather invented, and we trust the Hershey Company to be the caretaker of the brand.”
Part of the confusion, as Hilgers sees it, comes from how much the lineup has grown. Hershey says the classic cups are untouched, while the newer molded products carry the coating, and she says that distinction is what gets lost in the public outcry.
“Nothing stays the same forever,” she said. “It still tastes like a peanut butter cup. If you get a piece of candy that’s off the line here in Hershey, it tastes the way it tasted to me when I was a kid.”
“He doesn’t work for the company. He never did,” she said. “He’s not an expert in candy manufacturing, and there’s a whole process and science to it. They have to do what they have to do, and like I said, we don’t feel that it has damaged the quality of the piece of candy.”
She keeps Reese’s in a candy dish at home for when her grandson visits. Her favorite is the Take5, one of the bars with the new coating. “I don’t know anybody else that reacted that drastically to having to spit the candy out,” she said.
H.B. Reese died the year before she was born, but the family stayed close to the factory. For years there was an annual reunion every August at an uncle’s farm, followed by a family tour of the plant. H.B. Reese had 16 children, and Hilgers counts about 35 first cousins.
Brad Reese’s father, Dick, was the surviving twin of a pair of brothers, the youngest son and one of her favorite uncles, she said. That branch of the family left Hershey, first for Canada and later Florida. She last spoke with Brad about three years ago.
“I wouldn’t really call it estranged,” she said. “We’re just not on the same wavelength as Brad at this point in time.”
“We really would like him to just settle down, calm down, and live his life,” she said. “Be happy.”
But for Brad Reese, it’s a point of pride: His grandfather invented one of the world’s most iconic chocolate candies, and Hershey has admitted to changing the recipe on products that bear his last name.
“You can’t trust the Reese’s logo,” he said. “Look at the back of the ingredient panel and look to see whether it says milk chocolate.”
“I feel total betrayal, and I’m not gonna sit idly by while they trade on my grandfather’s legacy.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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