Hershey’s Great Candy Expedition

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Six worlds, every route different, and a unifying anthem that held it all together.

Brand Activations
Activations & Experiential
Sonic Branding & Design

Hershey's Great Candy Expedition was built to mark a milestone: the 50th anniversary of Hershey's Chocolate World in Pennsylvania.

To celebrate, Hershey's commissioned a bespoke “choose-your-own-adventure” cinematic experience housed in a first-of-its-kind 270-degree wrap-around cinema, complete with audience interaction and multi-sensory effects.

MassiveMusic Sydney, brought in by Spinifex agency, was tasked with building the complete music and sound world for the experience: six distinct sonic environments, a unifying musical theme, a full pre-show atmosphere and the technical precision to make every seat in the room feel it.

Challenge

Guests aboard the Hersheyland Express could explore three of the six destinations, chosen by audience vote in real time by using buttons built into their seats. The sequence would vary drastically from show to show, which meant the music had to hold together across any possible combination of routes without losing coherence.

Each destination required its own distinct sonic world, spanning genres as different and vast as Appalachian orchestral, surf rock, synth-pop, and hip-hop, while the overall experience still had to feel like one connected journey. The experiential sound design also had to work physically: sub-sonic frequencies were timed to key moments to trigger the seat vibrations, meaning the music had to be as technically precise as it was emotionally immersive.

One major complication remained: the journey could change every time.

The production complexity compounded the creative challenge. Animation was being delivered in layers throughout the project, with foreground character movement created separately from background environment plates, which meant sync targets kept shifting right up until the final mix. The timeline was tight: a scheduled technical run-through for the brand new cinema was fixed and the team had to get the creative foundations in place before they could begin learning how to execute the technical requirements of a cinema format that had never existed before in North America.

Audience reacting as Twizzlers, Reese's, Kit Kat and Kisses worlds play across the Great Candy Expedition screens

Approach

We began to work backwards by composing the show’s finale with an anthemic chorus that would end every performance on the same high note. The starting point was the lyrics. Once "sharing goodness with you" was approved, the team moved to composition, drawing on our global network to find the right voice for the anthem. Singer-songwriter Nathan Cavaleri delivered it. That motif became the musical heartbeat of the entire experience, a theme that could be seeded into every destination's score so that no matter which lands the audience visited or in which order, the journey always felt connected.

With the unifying theme in place, MassiveMusic built each destination from scratch. As animation was still incomplete at the start of composition, the composers were briefed to follow the pre-recorded script, ensuring key moments of the journey were accounted for regardless of what the final pictures delivered. Each environment received its own musical language whilst sharing the same underlying motif. The sound design team took equal care with every non-musical element: machinery, train movement, environmental atmosphere, and the sub-sonic frequencies that would trigger the seats, all designed as part of the same connected world.

Vocal, keyboard and orchestral scoring sessions behind MassiveMusic's music for Hershey's Great Candy Expedition

SOLUTION

The experience begins before the film does.

In the Art Deco-inspired train station pre-show, guests waiting to board the Hersheyland Express are met with a sparse, mystical score layered over detailed atmospheric sound design. Distant steam trains, whistles, announcers, and the sound of bustling activity, all crafted to evoke the golden age of travel and build anticipation before a single frame of the film has played.

Once aboard, six worlds unfold. Kit Kat Timbers through an expansive Appalachian orchestral score. Almond Joy/Mounds Cove into surf rock. Jolly Rancher Junction into synth-pop and EDM. Reese's Ridge into hip-hop and rock. Kisses Valley and Twizzlers Forest each with their own distinct sonic identity. The shared musical motif moves between all of them, allowing the experience to change route from show to show without ever losing its centre.

To bring it all to life, MassiveMusic coordinated singers, songwriters, voice actors, composers, orchestrators and mix engineers across recording studios worldwide, culminating in sessions with a 50-piece orchestra in Budapest. The entire production spanned more than three months of precise coordination. The result was as technical as it was creative: a fully immersive audio experience designed not simply to accompany the journey but to make the audience feel it too.