Bitter Truths About Chocolate - No 4

What do you think is the biggest chocolate company in the world? Hershey, right? Wrong. Mars Inc. is four times the size of Hershey (they make the Milky Way, Snickers, Mars Bar, plus countless other products). And they got there via pure insanity.

The company was started by Frank C. Mars out of nothing, Mars probably earning his first penny selling sugar-coated twigs to schoolchildren. So magnificently tight-assed was he that he poured every dollar into the slowly-growing business at the expense of his marriage and his relationship with his son, Forrest. When the two finally reunited after more than a decade of estrangement, Frank promptly sent Forrest off to Europe to expand the company. Then Frank died.

Forrest Mars then set himself up in a one-room factory in England and made chocolates--at a huge cost to his family. He eventually had to send them away because he couldn't afford to feed and house them. But it would all be worth it, as he would soon stumble upon the innovation that would make his career: candy-coated chocolates you now know as M&M's. And of course, shenanigans were involved.



Forrest manipulated an executive from rival Hershey into helping him produce M&M's, by offering to make the guy a partner. As proof, he offered to put the guy's name on the candy (the Hershey guy's name was Bruce Murrie, so M&M's stands for Mars & Murrie's). Then, once M&M's were a huge success and Mars had everything he wanted from Hershey, he proceeded to treat Murrie like dirt until he quit.

Forrest then had his own children. The kids of this real-life Willy Wonka, by the way, were never allowed to eat a single M&M. No, he wasn't worried about tooth decay or grimy fingers contaminating a batch of candy. He was just cheap. Forrest demanded perfection from his kids and ran his business like a Soviet gulag. One improperly wrapped piece of chocolate, a Mars bar without enough caramel, or even a pin-sized hole in a chocolate coating, and he, very reasonably, would go to the factory floor, fly into a rage, trash the place and reduce his workers to whimpering in the fetal position.

That barely scratches the surface of the Mars family craziness that continues to this very day.

The entire operation, now on its fourth generation of Mars family ownership, is run as if it has OCD. Millions of M&M's get thrown straight into the garbage if the M symbol isn't perfect. You know, those little candies you shovel into your face 10 at a time without glancing at them. The company is so secretive that they won't share their financial records with their own bankers. They won't go public for fear of having to tell stockholders what's going on.

Why are they so paranoid? Well ....... all will be revealed in Bitter Truths About Chocolate - No 5