FROM THE VAULT: OCTOBER 15, 1932

Hershey’s sweet benevolence.

Nearly 40 years after Milton S. Hershey began making chocolate, his candy company had grown to $41 million in sales, some $780 million in current dollars. In the depths of the Great Depression, it did nearly $8 million ($150 million) in profit, and “we could easily have knocked out another million dollars in earnings this year. But we preferred to do otherwise,” Hershey said.

Overall, people across the country were buying a lot less. By the end of 1932, U.S. consumer spending had declined by almost 40% in three years. Hershey wasn’t immune to the slowdown, but it hadn’t cut wages. Or laid anyone off. And what might have sounded “like a rather expensive philanthropy” had a real business reason behind it. “It pays to build up around you a loyal organization of interested people who don’t leave you just the minute someone else offers them ten cents more,” a Hershey executive said.

Hershey the founder died in 1945. But his company—now with $7.5 billion in annual revenue—and his legacy of corporate benevolence live on. There’s the Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pennsylvania (private and cost-free for 2,000 low-income kids), and the company’s policy of matching employee contributions to charities like the United Way dollar for dollar. Last year Hershey ranked No. 50 on our Just 100 list of the world’s best corporate citizens.