Reese's Pieces: The candy that helped E.T. come home
A stranded visitor from space found a welcome in a handful of Reese's Pieces. In Steven Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, the candy helped draw the creature into a house and into a friendship with Elliott, a lonely boy in suburban California. Behind that small gesture was a business decision made while the sweets' early sales momentum was fading. Universal Studios had chosen the candy for a featured role and called Hershey to discuss promoting the film. The invitation arrived while Hershey was investing in more capacity to make the product.
The manufacturing story began well before the alien arrived. During the 1950s, Hershey developed the ability to coat products in sugar, a process known as panning. Its first effort was Hershey-Ets, small chocolate discs covered in candy. Selling them presented a problem: explaining them meant referring to a competitor, M&Ms. Hershey eventually discontinued that product except for seasonal and holiday uses. The equipment and production methods, however, remained useful. In the 1970s, a formula for sweetened peanut meal with a chocolate-like consistency gave the company a different filling to put inside a candy shell.
That peanut product initially had the name PBs before becoming Reese's Pieces. Its launch brought a strong increase in sales, followed by a plateau and then a decline. The downturn was not alarming, but it was troubling because Hershey was adding manufacturing capacity. A new plant at Stuart's Draft, Virginia, was being built with plans to make the candy there as well as in Hershey. The company therefore faced two connected challenges: keeping interest in the product alive and finding enough demand to justify its expanding production. A place in a major movie offered a different route to customers.
Jack Dowd, Hershey's director of new product development, traveled to California to meet Universal officials. They outlined a film in which an alien would be lured into a home with candy. A Universal vice president told Dowd that the filmmakers had decided against M&Ms. While considering another choice, the executive had asked his son for a suggestion; the boy named Reese's Pieces. The executive said he had not heard of them before that conversation. Dowd saw an opportunity for the special promotion the product needed and agreed to support the movie with about a million dollars in marketing.
Hershey would create consumer promotions, trade promotions, and displays featuring E.T. In return, the company received an exclusive arrangement for promotion and advertising in the confectionery field. It was Hershey's first partnership with Hollywood to promote both a movie and a product appearing in it. Dowd then had to explain the commitment to company president Earl Spangler and the staff. The film remained confidential: Dowd could not show them a script or a picture of the creature, and he had not seen its appearance himself. He had already agreed to the venture when Spangler asked whether it would work.
When an image finally arrived for a proposed promotional T-shirt, Spangler's reaction was far from enthusiastic. Dowd later remembered the president calling E.T. the ugliest creature he had seen. Kathleen Kennedy and Spielberg produced the film. Elliott tried to help his stranded friend contact home while scientists and government agents sought to capture the visitor. Henry Thomas played the boy, and the cast also included Dee Wallace, Peter Coyote, Robert MacNaughton, and Drew Barrymore. Melissa Mathison wrote the screenplay, and Carlo Rambaldi designed E.T.
Following the New York premiere, employees and their families attended a special screening at the Hershey Lodge theater. Dowd recalled that the audience remained silent when the screen went black, then broke into enormous applause. He went into the lobby to watch people leaving and saw tearful faces. Spangler, too, had moist eyes. When Dowd asked whether the creature was still ugly, the president called him beautiful. For Dowd, that exchange became a high point of the project. The executive who had disliked a still image had responded warmly after seeing the character's journey through the film.
Released in the summer of 1982, E.T. became an enormous hit, and demand for Reese's Pieces rose beyond Hershey's expectations. The Stuart's Draft plant began operating in time to help meet it, turning the company's additional capacity into an advantage. The film's creative team included cinematographer Allen Daviau, editor Carol Littleton, and composer John Williams, with Dennis Muren supervising visual effects for Industrial Light & Magic. At the Academy Awards, the movie received honors for music, sound, visual effects, and sound effects editing.