Friday Fun – What’s Red, Yellow, Green, Brown & 75 Years Old?

If you guessed M&M’s – you win!

This year the Mars Candy Company, maker of M&M’s, is celebrating its 75^th Anniversary in a big way – with many different options available to “Celebrate With M”.  But let’s take a look at its history and some fun facts.

It’s a fairly well known fact that M&M’s began their existence as an exclusive military ration – yep, ration – for soldiers during World War II at the government’s request.  And that’s because, as their slogan goes, “They melt in your mouth – not in your hand!”  Although that slogan actually wasn’t introduced until 1954 – the same year they introduced Peanut M&M’s.  (Trivia Tidbit: Forrest Mars – M&M’s inventor – was allergic to peanuts, so he never got to taste one of his Peanut M&M’s.)

When the military contacted Mars about supplying the candy, they were originally packaged in cardboard tubes.  They were easier to ship, more durable to carry around and easier to pour and reclose out in the battlefield. 

The cardboard tubes gained a large and loyal following with the GIs, but Mars didn’t switch over to the familiar brown bag until 1948.  And in celebration of their 75^th, some stores now carry 12 different types of the retro-packaging (but I haven’t seen it).

But how did they actually come into being?  It all started back in 1911 when Frank C. Mars made his first Mars confections in his Tacoma, Washington kitchen.  Then in the 1920s his son, Forrest E. Mars, Sr., joined his father in business.  But they had such a falling out that in 1932 Forrest moved to England to try going it alone.  On a visit to Spain during that country’s civil war, he observed soldiers eating chocolate candies encased in a hard, sugary shell. 

Forrest Mars was well aware that chocolate sales always drastically dropped in the heat of the summer months – for obvious reasons.  And in addition to observing the Spanish Civil War soldiers enjoying their coated chocolates, when he got back to England he noted the British candy maker Rowntree’s of York had come out with Smarties, a similar hard-shelled chocolate candies.  So borrowing both the inspiration and the actual product, Forrest Mars developed a manufacturing process for M&M's Chocolate Candies, moved back to the States, patented it, and in 1941 began making them in a factory in Newark, New Jersey.

So what does M&M actually stand for?  Well, “Mars” would certainly be one of the Ms.  And the other is for “Murrie”.

After Mars came up with his patent for M&M's, he approached Bruce Murrie who happened to be the son of Hershey’s Company president William Murrie, about a joint business venture.  Not only was Murrie good for the money, but he was also a strategic partner for Mars since Hershey’s had major control for the production of rationed chocolate during World War II.  And for the first few years M&M's were made using Hershey’s chocolate.  But Forrest Mars, as with his father, had another falling out, and so in 1949 Mars bought out Murrie for $1 million and took control of the company.

Later, Mars moved his main manufacturing to its current site in Hackettstown, NJ in 1958 – and the plant is HUGE!  It encompasses over 460,000 square feet and its 1,500 employees produce about half of all the M&M’s made in America.  Two other plants (Cleveland, TN and Topeka, KS) make the rest.

The New Jersey factory – the company’s largest – produces 2 billion M&M’s every eight hours … or more than 4 million made every minute … or 69,000 every second.  And it takes about 8 hours to make just one!  Most of the time is spent tumbling in the shell-coating vat where they are constantly sprayed for 5-7 HOURS. 

While plain M&M’s are the #1 selling candy in the world, the peanut variety are #2 in the US, behind Reese’s Pieces, with Snickers (also a Mars product) #3 and plain M&M’s #4.  And M&M’s account for over $1 billion in sales of Mars’ $33 billion annual sales take.  (Mars does make a lot of other things besides candy.)

And M&M’s might not be second to Reese’s Pieces if they hadn’t blown their chance for cinema placement stardom.  While preparing to film his movie “E.T.”, Steven Spielberg first approached Mars to see if he could use M&M's in the scene where Elliott tries to lure the shy alien out from the forest with candy.  For whatever reason (and it’s not clear exactly why), Mars turned down the offer.  BIG MISTAKE!  So Spielberg then went to Hershey’s, who pounced on the opportunity.  But Spielberg had actually wanted to them use Hershey Kisses – but the Hershey’s insisted he use its new Reese’s Pieces candies. The result, as they say, is history.

But while Mars missed a major promotional opportunity with “E.T.”, they did recover a bit with “Candy the Cow” – an M&M cow made of 67,000 M&M's, all of which were painstakingly individually placed by hand.  “Candy the Cow” made her debut at the 1990 Erie County Fair, and even appeared on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee.

The original M&M's colors were red, orange, yellow, green and violet.  But the now-iconic signature “M” wasn’t stamped on the candies until 1950 – nine years after its inception.  And originally it was in black rather than white – the change to white happened four years later, in 1954. 

Forrest Mars demanded that the “M” appear perfectly in the center of each candy, and would go around buying bags to ensure his demand was carried out.  His employees speculate that his split with Murrie just one year earlier is the reason why there is just one “M” on each piece.

Back in the early ‘70s, there was a Russian study that link the red food dye amaranth (popularly known as Red No. 2) to cancer in humans.  Before subsequent testing showed the results to be erroneous, the Food and Drug Administration “out of an abundance of caution” decided to ban its use in America in 1976.  And although red M&M's didn’t actually even use Red No. 2, the company pulled the color and replaced it with orange to avoid any confusion.  For an entire decade the favored red M&M stayed on the bench, until reintroduced in 1986.

In the mid ‘90s, Mars concluded that there was no need to have both a tan and brown M&M. so the tan ones were eliminated.  But to counter the disappointment, they decided to have a contest for its replacement with selection between pink, purple or blue where customers got to vote for the winner.  It was a huge promotional success, and blue won.

Many of us are familiar with Van Halen demanding that there be lots of M&M’s available at their concert venue – but NO BROWN ONES!  He’d check, and if he found a brown one, he’d cancel the concert.  But I wasn’t aware of this tidbit, and no one know how or why, but a rumor began circulating that the green ones had aphrodisiac properties.  Taking advantage of this apocryphal story, Mars launched a limited-edition run of all-green M&M’s for Valentine’s Day in 2008.

Interestingly, Google headquarters had a unique problem with M&M’s.  Google provides LOTS of perks to their employees, and one of them was an unlimited and ubiquitous supply of M&M’s.  And their employees were eating too many of them … costing them a fortune!  So in true to Google-mode, they brought a team of PhDs in to look into the problem, and they concluded that it was all a matter of easy access.  You could hardly travel anywhere in their offices without running into an attractively displayed bowl of M&M’s.  So they cut back on the opportunity for easy-snacking, put them in opaque bowls and started offering fruit as an alternative.  And amazingly enough 3.1 million fewer calories were consumed over a seven-week period among the New York office’s 2,000 employees!

It’s mind-boggling the variety of M&M products available.  According to the M&M’s website the list includes: Peanut Butter, Crispy, Pretzel, Dark Chocolate, Almond, Dark Mint, and Dark Chocolate Peanut varieties, as well as an M&M’s Chocolate Bar and M&M’s Mega, marketed as “The World’s Biggest M&M’s” with three times more chocolate than usual. There are also the M&M’s Minis, White Chocolate, Triple Chocolate, Coconut, Orange Chocolate, Raspberry, White Chocolate Candy Corn, Wildly Cherry, Mocha, Cinnamon Milk Chocolate, Razzberry Chocolate, Strawberried Peanut Butter, and Raspberry Almond varieties, among others. And just last August, M&M’s unveiled Pecan Pie and Pumpkin Spice Latte M&M’s for the fall season.

But if you didn’t think there were enough combinations and permutations already available, to help “Celebrate the M” for its 75^th, they had another consumer contest this spring that closed June 17 to select a new flavor between Chili Nut, Honey Nut and Coffee Nut.  And Coffee Nut won.  (Has anyone tried any of these?)

And as part of their “Celebrate With M” (and unlike Trump) Mars is honoring its origin as a military ration during World War II by actually donating $750,000 of products to Operation Gratitude that will be placed in military care packages throughout 2016.

So pop an M&M of your favorite variety and in one of its TWENTY-FIVE available colors, and “Celebrate With M”

RESOURCES

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/03/03/mms-75th-anniversary/81173224/

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mms-turns-75-years-young-and-launches-year-long-celebration-for-fans-300230653.html

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2016/03/mms_turn_75_how_the_nj_candy_has_changed_over_the.html#0

http://mentalfloss.com/article/69163/15-melt-your-mouth-facts-about-mms

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2015/05/mms_mars_factory_hackettstown_nj.html