THE EMPERORS OF CHOCOLATE: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.

• Author: Surowiecki, James
• Position: Review

THE EMPERORS OF CHOCOLATE: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars By Joel Glenn Brenner Random House, $29.95

YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO VERY far to find evidence that we live in a global economy. Just take a drive down to the local convenience store and pause in front of the register, where you'll see rows of a product whose raw material comes from South America, whose manufacturing and packaging takes place anywhere from Mexico to Pennsylvania, and whose marketing is now ubiquitous around the world. Yes, the candy bar is a multinational product par excellence.

But the candy bar--or, more accurately, chocolate--is also an American product par excellence. Aside from Coca-Cola and McDonald's, is there a more recognizable symbol of American consumer culture than the Hershey bar? From Lucy Ricardo stuffing her face with bon bons while working on the candy line to E.T. being lured from hiding with Reese's Pieces, candy has been an integral part of American pop culture. Americans even have different tastes in chocolate than much of the rest of the world, preferring Hershey's slightly sour milk chocolate to the more traditional European flavor.

All of this means that there's something inherently interesting about Joel Glenn Brenner's The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars, an often entertaining but ultimately thin mix of business and cultural history. Brenner does an excellent job of tracing the separate stories of the two American candy powerhouses, Hershey and Mars. Her book is filled with sharply drawn anecdotes about candy making and candy eating, and she gives us convincing character studies of the two key figures in this history: Milton Hershey and Forrest Mars. In the end, though, the book comes up short in its understanding of American business, which is something of a problem for a book that's supposed to be about the competition between two companies. You walk away from The Emperors of Chocolate knowing a lot more than you thought you ever would know about chocolate, but not much more than you did about business.

Ironically, though, it's the business implications of this story that are the most interesting, and the most perplexing. In certain respects, after all, the contest between Hershey and Mars (who together control something like 75 percent of the U.S. candy market) is much like that between Coke and Pepsi, or for that matter between General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. These companies' economies of...