Business: Haute Chocolate

WHEN TRACI GENTRY had to pick a name for Hershey’s new line of upscale chocolate, she found herself thinking about backyard grills. Backyard grills are hot these days. Some are no longer “grills” at all — that’s how hot. “They’re ‘outdoor kitchens,’” says Gentry, who particularly admires the GE Monogram line of “outdoor cooking centers”: their sleek frames, their stainless-steel finishes, their retail prices exceeding $3,500 for the deluxe 48-inch model, minus wheel cart.

An upscale chocolate bar is a lot cheaper than an outdoor cooking center, but it turns out that the kind of person who slides past aisle after aisle of perfectly good $300 grills and “trades up” to a deluxe outdoor cooking center is exactly the kind of person Traci Gentry needs to cajole, teach, tantalize, inspire. Yet her major strength — the firepower of the huge company she works for — is also her major handicap, because that firepower comes attached to a name, Hershey, that has never been associated with upscale anything. Hershey made its bones with the masses, the mob, with John Q. Public and Dick and Jane and GI Joe — the biggest and most iconic candy company in America, the one that makes those bags of miniature Krackels and Mr. Goodbars you keep in the fridge around Halloween. Hershey, A Brand You’ve Trusted Since You Were Breast-Feeding, But Only to Get Your Rocks Off, Sugar-Wise.

Gentry is the director of global chocolate innovation for Hershey. That’s really what she says her job title is. In addition to upscale chocolate, she’s involved in adapting “core” Hershey brands for emerging foreign markets: green-tea Kisses in China, coconut-flavored cereal bars in Brazil. On a Wednesday morning, I drive from Philly to Hershey to meet her at a bucolic corporate campus just a few miles from Milton Hershey’s original 1903 factory — the one everyone said he was crazy to build, plunking it down in the middle of a pasture and using the rocks from a nearby quarry to raise houses for his workers. The campus is called “Crystal A,” after the name Milton Hershey gave to his first successful candy. A guy from corporate PR greets me at the front desk and walks me down through the building’s airy cafeteria and into a beige dining room. Gentry is sitting at a table with a second PR guy. The first PR guy takes off.

Gentry, 40, is friendly, warm. ­Shoulder-length brown hair, plaid skirt. Very in control of her world. I start by comparing the plain old Hershey bars, which I’ll abbreviate hereafter as “­POHBs,” to “mediocre coffee” — a mistake! She asks me, in a charmingly conspiratorial way, to “promise not to call Hershey bars mediocre or bad.” (Think about those commercials for Budweiser Select that have you thinking, Select? So what’s the other Bud made of — rejected crap?) Gentry says, “We call it ‘everyday’ or ‘original.’ We come up with different ways to say it. But I think there will always be a place in people’s lives for it.”

“Great American Chocolate Bar,” says Patrick, the PR guy, taking notes.

“Great American Chocolate Bar,” says Gentry.

But today isn’t about the GACB/POHB. It’s about the new upscale bars, which Gentry’s group decided to call “Cacao Reserve,” borrowing a term from the wine industry. Small squares of Cacao Reserve bars are spread in front of me, atop paper placemats. Full versions of the bars are laid out to my right. They don’t look anything like the POHBs I’ve been eating my whole life. Rather than a flimsy solid-­color sleeve, the new bars come sheathed in thick card stock printed with jazzy colors. On the São Tomé Single-­Origin, for instance, there’s a picture of palm trees and a boat, and, below that, “Rich and robust chocolate notes and hints of aromatic coffee.” The back says NATURAL SOURCE OF FLAVANOL ANTIOXIDANTS. The bar is longer, wider and thinner than a POHB. The silver foil is shiny and tightly packed. A solid ingot.