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In April 1937, U.S. Army Quartermaster Captain Paul Logan approached The Hershey Company with a weird request to create a chocolate bar that soldiers wouldn’t want to eat.
He met with Hershey’s then President William Murrie and Chief Chemist Sam Hinkle. He said that he was looking for a candy bar that tasted “just a little better than a boiled potato.” If it tasted too good he feared the soldiers would eat all the emergency rations prematurely.
When developing the Ration D Bar, Hinkle discovered that standard chocolate manufacturing equipment couldn’t handle the thick paste. Normally, chocolate flowed when warm, but the military formula wouldn’t flow at any temperature.
For the first 90,000-bar production run in June 1937, workers had to manually weigh, knead, and press each four-ounce portion into molds. It was a labor intensive three-week process that required entirely new machinery and methods for mass production.
The Ration D Bars were first tested during Admiral Byrd’s 1939 Antarctic expedition, proving they could sustain themselves in severe weather conditions.
When Pearl Harbor thrust America into World War II in 1941, the Quartermaster Corps mandated that each new bar needed to be sealed in cellophane, dipped in protective wax, and packed in multiple layers of containers. It was the only way to protect the candy bars against chemical warfare.
By 1943, responding to widespread complaints about the D-ration’s taste, the Army Procurement Division requested an improved variant. To do this, Hershey’s food scientist developed the Tropical Bar which was more palatable than its predecessor, but still remained challenging to eat.
U.S. Congress later moved to classify candy production as non-essential during WWII. During the hearings, Milton Hershey successfully defended chocolate’s military importance before Congress.
Congress gave the green light, and production scaled dramatically—from 100,000 ration bars daily in 1939 to 24 million weekly by 1945. Over 3 billion Ration D Bars were produced during the war years.
On a funny side note, Troops nicknamed the bar “Hitler’s Secret Weapon” due to its severe gastrointestinal effects. The rock-hard chocolate also required a knife to shave into edible portions, making it particularly problematic for soldiers with dental issues. Even those with healthy teeth had to carefully slice thin shavings and let them dissolve slowly.
Later on, The Ration D Bar found an unexpected use in the China-Burma-India (CBI) Theater.
Medical officers discovered that soldiers suffering from dysentery could digest the D-ration bars when all other foods proved intolerable, leading to its nickname as the “dysentery ration” among CBI personnel.
The Ration D formula saw a significant revision in 1957 with the removal of oat flour to improve the taste.
The Tropical Bar joined the Apollo 15 lunar mission in July 1971, a key ration for astronauts.
The candy bar continued to be served to soldiers in modern conflicts. In the 1980s, the Army developed the “Congo Bar,” capable of withstanding 140°F heat.
During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Hershey produced the “Desert Bar” for troops in Southwest Asia. However, this would be the last time The Hershey Company would collaborate with the U.S. military. It would later be discontinued in the early 2000s.
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