Milton Hershey

Before he became America’s chocolate king, Milton Snavely Hershey was a serial business failure. Born in 1857 in rural Pennsylvania and largely self-taught after leaving school in the fourth grade, he apprenticed to a Lancaster confectioner and then struck out on his own. His first candy shop in Philadelphia limped along for several years before closing around 1882. He chased opportunity to Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, and New York City, and watched each venture fail in turn.

Hershey came home to Lancaster broke and, in the eyes of relatives who had lent him money, something of a disappointment. But two things he had picked up on the road would prove decisive: in Denver he learned to make caramel with fresh milk, and the experience taught him that quality dairy was the secret to candy that customers came back for. In 1886 he founded the Lancaster Caramel Company on that insight.

This time it worked, and spectacularly. The fresh-milk caramels won large orders, and within a few years the company employed well over a thousand people. In 1900 Hershey sold the caramel business for a reported $1 million, an enormous sum, and kept the chocolate-making equipment he had been experimenting with on the side.

He used the proceeds and his Hershey Chocolate Company to do something no American had done at scale: mass-produce an affordable milk chocolate bar. To make it, he built an entire town, Hershey, Pennsylvania, around his factory, and he poured his fortune into the Milton Hershey School for orphaned children. When he died in 1945, the failed shopkeeper had become one of the most generous industrialists in American history.

H. J. Heinz

Henry John Heinz built one of the most recognizable food companies in the world, but he got there only after a humiliating bankruptcy that he refused to let define him. Born near Pittsburgh in 1844, Heinz showed a knack for selling produce as a boy. In 1869 he co-founded Heinz, Noble & Company, bottling his mother’s horseradish recipe in clear glass so customers could see its purity. The business grew fast until it didn’t.

The long depression that followed the Panic of 1873 caught up with the firm. A bumper harvest collapsed the price of the crops Heinz had contracted for, the company could not meet its obligations, and in 1875 Heinz, Noble & Company failed. Heinz himself was declared insolvent. He later called the Christmas of 1875 the worst of his life; the family’s furniture was sold and creditors were left unpaid.

Though the bankruptcy legally discharged his debts, Heinz did not consider himself released from them. He started over in 1876 with his brother John and cousin Frederick as F. & J. Heinz, and he opened a private ledger he labeled “M.O.” for Moral Obligations, listing every creditor of the failed firm. Over years he repaid them, even though the law did not require it.

The new company thrived, introducing ketchup and dozens of other condiments, adopting the famous “57 Varieties” slogan in 1896, and reorganizing as the H. J. Heinz Company. Heinz became a pioneer of sanitary food production, employee welfare, and the pure-food movement. By the time he died in 1919, the man once ruined by bankruptcy presided over a clean, modern food empire built, in part, on the determination to make good on a debt he no longer legally owed.