The Parent Company That Makes Reese's Cups

Since their creation in 1928, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups have been incredibly popular in the United States and the rest of the world. The brilliant combination of creamy peanut butter enrobed in rich, milk chocolate is hard to resist. To this day, the candy remains a top seller at its parent company, The Hershey Company.

"You got peanut butter in my chocolate! You got chocolate in my peanut butter!" Though a hilarious collision between opera singers or cowboys — or other unlikely scenarios the 70s and 80s TV commercials professed — would've been a great origin story, the history of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups is much more down-to-earth. In Pennsylvania, where the chocolate kiss was first made (and not by Hershey's either), Harry Burnett Reese, a previous dairy employee of Milton S. Hershey, created his own candy business using his former employer's chocolate. Several decades later, in 1963, Reese sold his confection company to The Hershey Company for nearly $24 million.

The peanut butter chocolate sensation acquired by Hershey's has become the company's best-selling candy, earning over $3 billion in sales for the U.S. chocolatier in 2023, per slides from the company's 2024 stockholder meeting. Reese's even held the top slot for the most popular candy in the country for several years, but was just beat out by M&M's made by Mars, Inc., one of Hershey's top competitors, in 2024.

Regardless of which candy holds the top slot, the popularity of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups is unlikely to wane drastically anytime soon. Even a fake news story in 2017 claiming the confection's discontinuation couldn't stop Reese's overwhelming success. Meanwhile, the gluten-free candy continues to take new shapes and forms. In the spring of 2024, Hershey's debuted Reese's Peanut Butter Mini-Eggs for Easter. It's not the first, and doubtlessly not the last, incarnation of the popular peanut butter and chocolate combination we'll see from Hershey's.