Candy Professor

1906 Novelty: Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Wafer Mail Pouch

July 7, 2010 at 12:40 pm Leave a comment

If you are a fan of Hershey’s and a history buff, you might know the excellent book by James McMahon called Built on Chocolate: The Story of the Hershey Chocolate Company. This is a lavishly illustrated authorized company history. McMahon is the curator of the Hershey Museum, and he had access to the company archives to reproduce examples of goods and ephemera from every era of Hershey.

But here’s one he didn’t include:

This is a 1906 ad for milk chocolate wafers in a novelty package. The bag looks like a mail bag. But there’s more:

The mail car creates an intriguing display for the individual mail pouches. This is in a period when the idea of retail display is really in its infancy. Hershey had very fancy wrappers for his goods, suggeting that part of his success was in grasping early on the importance of presentation.

Milton Hershey had perfected his milk chocolate formula only a few years before, and began selling the first milk chocolate bars made in America in 1900. Milk chocolate “kisses” would be introduced in 1907. So this 1906 milk chocolate wafer is something in between, an intermediate step between the full-size bars and the foil wrapped kisses. It’s hard to say just how big this mail sack is, but since a milk chocolate bar for eating was sold at 5 cents in 1906, this 10 cent portion must have been substantially more.

This ad appeared in Confectioners Journal in October 1906.

For more on the history of Hershey’s Kisses, see my related posts:

Entry filed under: 1890 to WW I, Candies We Miss, Chocolate, Packaging. Tags: hersheys, milk chocolate.