The grandson of the inventor of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, who has publicly criticized The Hershey Company for tinkering with the classic formula in its spinoff products, appears to have gotten some sweet revenge.

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The candy company has announced that it will return to using “classic milk and dark chocolate recipes” in all its Reese’s and Hershey’s products by 2027.

“If this is true, the people who deserve the credit are the loyal fans who were alarmed by what Hershey was doing,” Brad Reese told NBC News on Wednesday. “But I am seeing a lot of red flags here. I think what Hershey is trying to do here is change with PR narrative.”

Reese, whose demands that Hershey stop skimping on chocolate went viral in February, said he trusts his taste buds more than he trusts the company that produces iconic candies that bear his family name.

“If something like the Valentine’s Day Reese’s Mini Heart still doesn’t taste like real milk chocolate next year, I’ll know they’re lying,” he said.

Hershey CEO Kirk Tanner made the announcement on Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg.

“We’re going to make some small investments to really align the portfolio to what the brand stands for,” Tanner said. “That consistency is important across the brand.”

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups have been made with the same ingredients since 1928 — milk chocolate and peanut butter.

Starting next year, Tanner said candies inspired by the originals — like the “mini Reese’s cups and shapes,” as well as the Reese’s Fast Break candy bar — will also be made with real milk chocolate instead of a chocolate compound coating.

In addition, all the classic Hershey’s chocolate bars will also be made with “pure milk and dark chocolate,” he said. And Hershey is “enhancing” the Kit Kat candy bar “for a creamier taste and texture.”

In all, the company said the shift from chocolate compound coatings to the real thing will affect less than 3% of the Reese’s products and a tiny portion of Hershey’s products.

And Hershey is “on track” to remove all artificial colors from its products by the end of next year, the company said.

Tanner, in the Bloomberg interview, also insisted that the switch back to real chocolate was in the works long before Reese went public with his complaints.

“Right when I started with the company, we did a deep dive across our portfolio,” said Tanner, who joined the firm in August 2025.

Reese scoffed at that claim from Tanner.

“You know when this became an issue?” he asked. “Valentine’s Day. This has been going on since Valentine’s Day.”

Reese began taking Hershey to task after discovering that the company had replaced the milk chocolate with a chocolate-flavored coating on some of its Reese’s-inspired products, like the Valentine’s Day Reese’s Mini Hearts.

Infuriated, Reese posted a link to a letter of complaint he wrote to Todd Scott, who does the corporate branding for Hershey, on his LinkedIn page.

Reese invoked the name of his grandfather H.B. Reese, who created the iconic peanut butter cup in 1928 and started a candy company that produced them until 1963. Hershey has been making them ever since.

“My grandfather,” Reese wrote, “built REESE’S on a simple, enduring architecture: Milk Chocolate + Peanut Butter.”

But Hershey, he wrote, has replaced the original formula “with compound coatings and Peanut Butter with peanut-butter style cremes across multiple REESE’S products.”

That letter went viral.

Hershey insisted that the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were made the same way they had always been. But the company also conceded that, as it expanded its “Reese’s product line,” it had tinkered with the original recipe.

Right now, the Reese’s Mini Eggs that are a staple at Easter celebrations do not contain milk chocolate, according to their labels.

Neither do Reese’s Pieces, which were introduced in 1978 and became a sensation after they were featured in the 1982 movie “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”

In response to an NBC News request for a full list of Reese’s and Hershey’s products that will return to using “classic milk and dark chocolate recipes,” the company released a statement that reiterated much of what Tanner said earlier.

“The core recipes for our Hershey’s chocolate bars and Reese’s peanut butter cups have not changed,” it said in part.

WASHINGTON — House and Senate Republican leaders jointly announced a plan Wednesday that they said would end the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security that caused major airport delays.

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“In the coming days, Republicans in the Senate and House will be following through on the President’s directive by fully funding the entire Department of Homeland Security on two parallel tracks: through the appropriations process and through the reconciliation process,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said in a statement.

The two leaders were vague about the exact plan, but it appears to closely resemble the Senate’s preferred path from Friday.

Johnson and Thune heavily implied that it would be for the Senate to, once again, pass a bill it approved unanimously last week, which it could try to do as early as Thursday.

It would fund all of DHS except ICE and Customs and Border Protection, which Democrats won’t agree to fund without reforms to immigration enforcement operations. Those two agencies already have separate funding.

House Republican leaders trashed that bill and rejected it Friday, but they now appear ready to back down and accept the Senate plan. They would have to vote to pass it through the House.

GOP leadership had no immediate comment on the timing for a vote. Both chambers are scheduled to be on recess until April 13.

Then Republicans would fund ICE and CBP in a separate party-line “budget reconciliation” bill that could bypass a filibuster and get approved without any Democratic votes. The timing for that is even less clear.

Johnson and Thune said the “two-track” plan would “fully reopen the Department, make sure all federal workers are paid, and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years so that those law-enforcement activities can continue uninhibited.”

A White House official told NBC News that the administration supports the Johnson-Thune plan.

Earlier Wednesday, President Donald Trump called on Republicans to pass the party-line bill “no later than June 1st.” He threw the earlier plans to reopen DHS into chaos last week when he declined to comment on the Senate bill, which led House Republicans to reject it.

DHS has been shut down for more than a month, with employees for the TSA, FEMA and other agencies going for weeks without pay. Trump signed an executive order last week to pay TSA employees, but the legality and length of that plan are murky. Thousands of civilian Coast Guard employees and other DHS workers are still not being paid.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., slammed Republicans for having “derailed a bipartisan agreement” for days, “making American families pay the price for their dysfunction.”

“Throughout this fight, Senate Democrats never wavered. We were clear from the start: fund critical security, protect Americans, and no blank check for reckless ICE and Border Patrol enforcement,” he said Wednesday. “We were united, held the line, and refused to let Republican chaos win.”

On Friday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said, “House Democrats are prepared to support the bill to end the Trump-Republican shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, make sure TSA agents are paid, stand up for FEMA and for the Coast Guard, for our cyber security professionals, and stop inconveniencing Americans.”