How a Broke Candy Shop Became Bigger Than Hershey, McDonald’s, and Kellogg’s: The Story of Mars, Inc.

00:00:12
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. The world-famous Mars Corporation is a multi-billion-dollar confectionery giant. This one small-time, family-run sweet shop is now a bigger brand than McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, and even four times as big as Hershey, their biggest competitor. Here to tell the story of Mars Candy is Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, The Brain Food Show podcast. Let’s take a listener. Hold your breath, make a wish, Count three.

00:00:53
Speaker 2: It’s the legendary Roald Dahl book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, from nineteen sixty-four, and its subsequent two-film adaptations—nineteen seventy-one and two thousand and five—told the story of a magical candy factory and its eccentric and mysterious owner, Willy Wonka. A chocolate river; a gun that is a whole turkey dinner; never-ending gobstoppers; and, of course, the singing and dancing Perlumpers are just a few of the surprises that waited inside the doors of the famously secretive factory. Of course, in a real-life candy empire, there are a lot more failures, a lot more hard work. There are fathersome disputes and an unfortunate lack of unperlumpers. The story of Mars Candy starts in Newport, Minnesota, southeast of Saint Paul, with the birth of Franklin Clarence Mars on September the twenty-third, eighteen eighty-three. Frank was the son of a gristmill operator, grinding grains into flower, who only moved to Minnesota from Pennsylvania with his wife Alva, months prior to Frank’s birth. When Frank was little, he battled polio, which left him disabled for the rest of his life. As you might imagine from this, he was a rather immobile kid, so he spent a lot of time watching his mother Bacon cook, including watching her go through the difficult and tedious process of making fresh chocolates. He got so into candy that he began selling Taylor’s Molasses Chips and creating his own candy recipes while still in high school. By the time he graduated, he had a pretty successful career going, selling candy wholesale to stores in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. In nineteen oh two, he married F.L.G. Kissock, a schoolteacher. About a year later, Frank’s first son,

00:02:28
Speaker 3: Forrest, was born.

00:02:30
Speaker 2: It was also around this time that the candy markets became oversaturated, with the Hershey Bar having been introduced in nineteen hundred as the United States’ first mass-produced candy bar. A post of other locally-owned candy chains popped up.

00:02:43
Speaker 3: The competition was

00:02:44
Speaker 2: fierce, especially in the Minneapolis area. Brands like Chickastick, Pearson’s, and Cherry Hump started in Minnesota and all are still around today, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when Frank’s wholesale business went under. To add a little and juice to his fresh wound, in nineteen ten, Ethel divorced Frank for being unable to support her. She also won sole custody of Forest, who she promptly sent to live with her parents in Canada. The onliness of the divorce wasn’t a good omen for Frank and Forest’s future relationship.

00:03:14
Speaker 3: They would rarely see each other until years later.

00:03:16
Speaker 2: With tensions still running high, Frank, never a man to get too down, tried again, this time marrying another Ethel, Ethel V. Heally, and moving to Seattle, Washington, to go back into the candy business. He failed again with wholesaling, and creditors started taking his stuff. He moved thirty miles south to Coma and again struggled. In nineteen twenty, Frank and Ethel the Second moved back to Minnesota to be closer to their families. At this time, Frank had only four hundred dollars to his name, but despite his constant struggles with candy, he continued to try, this time making his own at three A.M. every morning, with his wife doing the selling. The candy bar was the Marrow Bar, made out of chocolate, nuts, and caramel. It was tough, but they started to make a little money, and then a good amount more. After years of trying, Frank Mars had finally carved out a somewhat lucrative career in candy. They were even able to buy a house and would have been comfortable being local candy suppliers, but the invention of the Milky Way changed all of that. It was also around this time that Frank’s son, Forrest, was establishing a mighty fine business sense.

00:04:22
Speaker 3: After attending college

00:04:23
Speaker 2: at Berkeley and later Yale, he became a traveling salesman for Camel cigarettes. As the legend goes, in Chicago, one night, Forest went a little overboard, plastering ads across the city for Camel. He was arrested, but his estranged father bailed him out. While at a soda counter, Forest looked into his chocolate malt glass and said, ‘Why don’t you push a chocolate malted

00:04:46
Speaker 3: drink in a candy bar?’

00:04:49
Speaker 2: Newgar had been invented in Italy in the fifteenth century. A variation of whipped egg whites and sugar syrup, instead of the normal honey, was invented by the Pendergast Candy Company in the early two twentieth century. They were based in, yes, Minneapolis, and the new Gar became known as Minneapolis Nougar. Frag. Mars. It started using this newga in his candies in nineteen twenty. In fact, he called the company the Newgar House for a time, but this time, in nineteen twenty-three, he mixed it with chocolate and put caramel on top of it. Using his cosmic name as an inspiration, he called it a Milky Way.

00:05:23
Speaker 3: It was introduced in that same year.

00:05:26
Speaker 2: Within a year, Mars’ sales jumped by tenfold, grossing about eight hundred thousand dollars. That’s about eleven million dollars today, said Forest. Later, that thing sold with no advertising. Mars Company quickly launched into orbit. They moved their headquarters to near Chicago, and by nineteen twenty-eight, just five years after introducing the Milky Way, they were making twenty million dollars in gross revenue. That’s about two hundred and seventy-three million dollars today. In nineteen thirty, they introduced the Snickers Bar, named after Frank’s favorite horse, and soon after, the Three Musketeers. Frank started living in Graham’s fashion, buying fast cars, big houses, and a horse farm for his wife. Meanwhile, Forrest didn’t like what he saw. Knowing that there was more profit and security to be had by cutting costs and expanding the business into other areas, he tried to convince his father to give him a third of the company and let him expand to Canada, Forest’s home country. Frank refused. Dans Forrest later recounting a conversation with his father: ‘I told my dad to stick his business up his if he didn’t want to give me a third. Right then,’ I said, ‘I’m leaving.’ In the end, Frank gave Forrest fifty thousand dollars and foreign rights to the Milky Way to basically leave his company alone and move to Europe. Fortunately for the company, that is exactly what Forrest did. While in Europe, Forest learned from Switzerland’s Nestle Chocolate Company about how to make good, sweet European-style candy. He tweaked the recipe of the Milky Way to make it more sweet.

00:06:55
Speaker 3: He called it the Mars Bar.

00:06:57
Speaker 2: It sold even better than the Milky Way in Europe, saying Forest his own considerable fortune. Frank passed away in nineteen thirty-four at the young age of fifteen. His wife Ethel took over the company, then Frank’s half-brother, William L. Slip Kroopen Baker, when Effel was too ill to run it. In nineteen forty-five, Efore passed away. The company moved to the next of

00:07:17
Speaker 3: kin, the business Sally Forest.

00:07:19
Speaker 2: Forrest took over the company and immediately diversified, turning Mars into more than just a candy company. He worked with a European pet food supplier and eventually created Whiskers cat food. He worked with a Texas salesman to create ready-to-make rice that became Uncle Ben’s Rice. Besides being a brilliant money-making businessman, he was also known to have a violent temper and demands for perfection.

00:07:42
Speaker 3: For example, he was known

00:07:43
Speaker 2: to throw chocolate bars out of windows if they didn’t meet his quality expectations. Remarkably quickly, he turned a regional candy maker into a worldwide food empire. Today, it is his three kids who are reaping the benefits: John, Forrest Junior, and Jacqueline. They are some of the richest people in the world, each owning a third of the Mars company, which employs over seventy-five thousand people and is valued at around seventy billion dollars, making his approximately the sixth largest privately held company in the world.

00:08:15
Speaker 3: And now for a

00:08:16
Speaker 2: bonus fact: In nineteen forty-one, Forest Mars Senior struck a deal with Bruce Murray, son of famed Hershey President William Murray, to develop a hard-shelled candy with chocolate at the centre. Mars needed Hershey’s chocolate because he anticipated there would be a chocolate shortage in the pending war, which turned out to be correct. As such, the deal gave Murray a twenty percent steak in the newly developed Eminem. This stake was later bought out by Mars when chocolate rationing ended at the end of the war. The name of the candy thus stood for Mars and Murray, the co-creators of the candy.

00:08:47
Speaker 3: As for how he got the idea,

00:08:48
Speaker 2: the Eminem was modeled after a candy Forest encountered while in Spain during his XR from Mars in the nineteen thirties, during the Spanish Civil War. There he observed soldiers eating chocolate pellets with a hard shell of tempered chocolate. This prevented the candies from melting, which was essential when included in their rations. Not surprisingly, during World War II, production of Eminem skyrocketed due to the fact that they were sold to the military and included as part of the United States soldiers’ rations. This also worked great at marketing because is when the soldiers came home, many were hooked.

00:09:21
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production at editing by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to Simon Whistler for telling one heck of a story about some of our favorite candies. And to think that out of one company came Milky Way, Snickers, and Three Musketeers, and that they’ve been around for a century in a world where brands come and go. What an achievement. The story of Mars, which is, of course, the story of Milky Way, Snickers, and Three Musketeers, and Eminem’s do here on our American Stories.