Grandson of Reese’s inventor says Hershey is selling a ‘total imitation’ of the candy recipe. The rest of the family insists it tastes the same

Orange is all but synonymous with Halloween. You have pumpkins, trick-or-treat baskets, costumes featuring a certain NBA team or the soccer team from a certain European country. And you’ll see it stacked highest in checkout aisles across the country: Halloween is Reese’s holiday. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were the top Halloween candy in Instacart’s and DoorDash’s order data last year. (Unsurprisingly, a third of October candy sales occur in its final week.)

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups—for those among us who live under a rock and missed the “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter” commercials that ran for years starting in the 1970s (in one, bizarrely, a woman walks down the street eating peanut butter straight from the jar)—have been around for nearly a century. The inventor, H.B. Reese, a former dairy farmer and shipping foreman for chocolatier Milton Hershey, mixed simple chocolate and peanut butter and started selling candy out of his home. The product quickly exploded in popularity, and to this day, that orange wrapper is all but synonymous with the candy.

For years, parents would look through a child’s Halloween haul and attempt to allot a portion or else, they noted, “your teeth will fall out.” In these instances, parents were alleged to have taken “the good ones” from their children’s loot, and, objectively, among those reserved would be a Reese’s product.

But that was until recently, when debates over whether the recipe has changed have caused some connoisseurs of the orange-wrapped concoction to question their taste: Did they really like this stuff as a kid? Or did the recipe actually change? These questions culminated earlier this year in a public spat between H.B. Reese’s grandson and the company that bought his grandfather’s invention: The Hershey Co.

In a retirement community in West Palm Beach, Fla., Brad Reese, 71, has spent eight months accusing the Hershey Co. of cheapening the candy his grandfather invented. In Hershey, Pa., where the cups are still made, his cousin Becky Hilgers speaks for the rest of the family, and she wants him to stop.

“Hershey’s killing Hershey,” Brad Reese told Fortune. “This is not the Hershey Company. It’s not the H.B. Reese candy. It’s not my company. My grandfather founded it. It is a total imitation. It’s a fraud.”

“I’m not sure what motivates him,” Hilgers said. “But he periodically does this.”

Between them stands Hershey. The company has conceded that it changed the coating on some Reese’s products and says it will change them back in 2027, and that those changes came before its current leadership took over. It says Brad Reese, who has never worked for the company, doesn’t understand how a global candy business operates. And it pointed to its third-quarter earnings, released Thursday, as evidence of how much people still love Reese’s.

Hershey has a repertoire of products, from classics like Kisses and its milk chocolate bars to Kit Kats and Almond Joys. But Reese’s stands apart from the rest of the lineup in sheer volume. It became the company’s top seller in 1969 and has remained so ever since. While Hershey doesn’t break out sales by brand, Reese’s is its flagship, bringing in $3 billion a year, or roughly a quarter of the company’s sales, according to a person familiar with Hershey’s operations.

The family’s stake started in 1963, when H.B. Reese’s six sons merged his company into Hershey. Hershey exchanged 666,316 shares of its stock for the Reese company, according to Hershey’s 1963 annual report, a deal worth about $23 million at the time.

Not every branch of the family kept them. “Some people hung on to their money more than others,” Hilgers said. She declined to further elaborate. “We were all fortunate and blessed to share in the success of my grandfather. I’ll just put it that way.” Brad Reese was 7 when the company was sold. He declined to say whether he holds Hershey stock.

The fight began on Feb. 14, often perceived as the holiday when absent-minded partners rush to the local pharmacy to grab a heart-shaped box of chocolates as a last-minute reprieve. That day, Reese opened a bag of Reese’s Unwrapped Mini Hearts, tried one, threw them out, and posted an open letter on LinkedIn. The label, he said, read only “chocolate candy” and peanut butter crème, not milk chocolate and peanut butter.