Hershey’s Brand Guidelines: The Brown

Hershey’s owns brown the way few brands own a colour.

Hershey’s identity is built on the most obvious — and most effective — possible foundation: the deep brown of chocolate itself, paired with silver foil. For America’s most famous chocolate maker, a rich cocoa brown and the glint of a wrapped bar or Kiss is the brand; you barely need the name. It’s a lesson in the power of the honest, literal choice: when your product is chocolate, make the brand look and feel like chocolate. That warm, appetising brown carries nostalgia and comfort for generations of Americans. Our homage keeps a segmented chocolate bar — deliberately not the Kiss, for reasons the next section makes clear.

In 2014 Hershey’s learned a hard lesson about abstract simplification.

In 2014, Hershey updated its corporate logo, replacing the photographic, foil-wrapped Kiss with a flat, solid-brown, stylised Kiss shape topped with a little curl. The internet’s verdict was instant and merciless: it looked exactly like the “poop” emoji. The mockery was everywhere, and the redesign became a byword for a well-intentioned modernisation gone wrong. The problem is a classic one: when you simplify a recognisable object into a flat, abstract shape, you can accidentally summon an unintended association — and in the emoji age, a brown blob with a curl on top has only one meaning. It’s a cautionary tale about testing a mark in the real cultural context, not just in the studio. Our homage steers well clear of the Kiss silhouette entirely.

Behind the brand is one of the great American industrial stories.

Hershey’s is more than a logo — it’s an institution. Milton Hershey founded the Hershey Chocolate Company in 1894 (initially in Lancaster, Pennsylvania), and after selling his earlier caramel business around 1900, he bet everything on mass-producing affordable milk chocolate for ordinary Americans. He built an entire company town — Hershey, Pennsylvania — with housing, schools and amenities for workers, and founded a school for orphaned children that still benefits from the company today. That deep, genuine heritage of accessibility and philanthropy underpins the brand’s wholesome, all-American image. The friendly brown wrapper isn’t just packaging; it’s the face of a company woven into the fabric of an American town.

The identity sells comfort and accessibility.

Everything about the Hershey’s brand signals comfort, familiarity and everyday affordability. This isn’t luxury Swiss or Belgian chocolate positioned as an indulgence; it’s the chocolate of childhood, of s’mores and trick-or-treating and the checkout aisle. The warm brown, the simple silver, the friendly lettering all reinforce that democratic, nostalgic promise: a small, reliable pleasure anyone can afford. That’s a deliberate and powerful position, and the visual identity nails it.

The 2014 stumble is instructive precisely because the rest of the brand is so strong. Hershey’s has enormous equity in its colour, its products’ shapes and its wholesome associations — and the misfire came from abstracting one of those beloved shapes a little too far. The fix, and the lesson, is to respect what makes the brand recognisable: the specific, appetising reality of chocolate, not a generic simplified blob. A brand this deeply tied to a physical pleasure is usually better served by looking more like the real thing, not less. Hershey’s endures because, poop-emoji detour aside, it has always understood that its best branding asset is chocolate itself — brown, sweet, and unmistakable.

The enduring takeaway from Hershey s is that meaning and consistency beat noise. A mark grounded in a genuine idea — and applied with discipline across every surface and every year — accumulates a kind of quiet authority that no amount of short-term cleverness can buy. Brands are forever tempted to reinvent themselves, but the most powerful identities are usually the most patient ones. The work is less about the initial flash of a design and far more about the long, unglamorous commitment to protecting and nurturing it until it becomes genuinely unmistakable.

Friendly, confident lettering in chocolate brown.

The Hershey’s wordmark is a friendly, confident set of letters, usually in that signature brown — approachable and all-American. The specimen below stands in with a sturdy sans.

Deep cocoa brown and silver. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

Hershey’s leans on a deep chocolate brown — best cited around #3C1321 — with silver and white. Exact values vary by source, so treat the brown as a faithful reconstruction. Lead with it below.

Keep the chocolate idea on hand — save the bar homage and the brown to a board.