The idea seemed simple: combine two of America's favorite snacks. Fans had been doing it themselves for years on TikTok, racking up 260 million views by sandwiching Reese's cups between Oreo wafers or mixing them into homemade treats. But when the snacks’ owners Hershey and Mondelez decided to create official Oreo-Reese's products, they discovered that executing a "simple" idea at industrial scale is anything but easy. What should have been straightforward became a three-year engineering challenge requiring secret meetings, coded language, and over 35 different prototypes. The companies had to solve problems no home baker faces: How do you maintain gluten-free status while adding cookie crumbs? How do you prevent peanut butter from turning Oreo filling a "distressing gray"?

The biggest obstacle was legal, though, not technical. Neither company would share the actual recipes for their flagship products, forcing them to reverse-engineer each other's flavors without knowing the formulas. Hershey and Mondelez scientists developed a mutual code, offering guidance like "take a look here" or "explore this angle" without revealing proprietary details. When Hershey needed to recreate Oreo's vanilla flavor, they couldn't just ask for the ingredient list. They had to work with specialist flavor houses to match the taste through trial and error. Mondelez faced the same challenge incorporating Reese's distinctive peanut butter, ultimately adding finely ground Oreo crumbs to prevent the peanut flavor from overpowering everything else.

The complexity reveals why innovation takes so much longer than consumers expect. Hershey's standard equipment pulverized Oreo pieces into useless dust, requiring new machinery designed specifically for cookie chunks. Mondelez struggled with peanut butter's sticky consistency, testing over 10 recipes to find one that wouldn't clog production lines or slide off cookie wafers. Each company needed the other's sign-off on final products, leading to months of prototype shipping and virtual taste tests. The result —  hitting shelves this fall — shows how protecting trade secrets can force companies to find creative solutions when the obvious path is blocked by intellectual property walls.

Questions:

  1. What are some reasons why it took years to create a snack combining both Reese’s cups and Oreos? 

  2. Do you think more companies should collaborate to create mashups of popular products? Why or why not?