King of Prussia, Pa. ? The chairman of the charitable trust that controls Hershey Foods Corp. said Wednesday that the board decided not to sell the company because it didn’t like the two bids it received, not because of community pressure.

“Sale talk is over,” Robert Vowler, the Hershey Trust Co. chairman and chief executive, said of the board’s decision.

Two Hershey Foods Corp. employees and a retiree are happy to read about Hershey Foods abandoning its plan to sell. Yvette Williams, Frank Simone, a retired employee, and Kay Brown show off Wednesday's headlines of the Patriot-News.

The board received two bids one from Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. for $12.5 billion, or $89 a share, and a joint offer from Nestle and Cadbury for $10.5 billion, or $75 a share but neither was satisfactory, Vowler said. Hershey Foods had been expected to receive bids as high as $15 billion.

The board voted 10-7 late Tuesday to abandon the sale of the company, Vowler said.

Wrigley issued a statement calling the decision “disappointing” and saying its offer had been a “thorough, thoughtful, fairly valued proposal.”

The Wrigley offer was a cash and stock deal, which would not have achieved the diversification of its $5.9 billion in assets that the board was seeking, Vowler said.

And the Nestle and Cadbury joint offer, while being all cash, was too low and did not include conditions that the trust deemed beneficial to the Hershey community, Vowler said.

While action in court against the company by the state attorney general was “in the back of people’s minds,” the trustees’ decision was based on financial considerations, Vowler said.

“We had to be very mindful that we were under a temporary injunction,” he said.

Pennsylvania Atty. Gen. Mike Fisher had sought the injunction, saying that he feared plant closings and massive layoffs if a sale went through, until a judge considered his petition to order the Hershey Trust Co. to seek court approval of any sale.

“I think they understood how opposed the community was to this, and I think they also understood … we were prepared to fight them every step of the way,” Fisher said Wednesday morning.