M&M’s are a Halloween staple, but the story behind the colorful candy is not as sweet as you may think. Before the chocolate treats became a global phenomenon, a father-son feud set the stage for their creation.
The year was 1932, and Midwestern candy maker Frank Mars was unhappy with some of his son Forrest’s ideas for the family business. Forrest had already come up with the idea of what would become the Milky Way bar, and it became a huge seller, but he had bigger dreams. According to The Guardian, he asked his father to sign over one-third of Mars Incorporated to him and to expand the business into Canada. Frank refused, their relationship deteriorated, and he ultimately pushed his son out of the Mars business.
“I wanted to conquer the whole… world,” Forrest once said. “I told my dad to stick the business up his a–.”
That year, Frank gave his son $50,000 and the foreign rights to Milky Way. Forrest moved to Europe, where another big idea was sparked several years after his father’s 1934 death.
The idea for M&M’s came during Forrest’s trip to Spain in the late 1930s, when he saw soldiers snacking on chocolate bits covered in a hard shell that prevented the candy from melting in their hands, per a post on Mars Military.
As noted by Hershey Community Archives, Forrest expected there would be a chocolate shortage developing during the pending World War II, so upon his return to the U.S., he approached Bruce Murrie, the son of Hershey’s Chocolate president William F.R. Murrie, for a deal that would ensure him access to his new candy’s key ingredient.
With Forrest’s ideas and manufacturing ambitions and Murrie’s access to Hershey’s chocolate, it was the perfect partnership.
“We had tremendous help from my father—an assured supply of chocolate and a lot of technical help,” Murrie said of the candy collaboration.
The company M&M’S Limited was formed in Newark, New Jersey, and the new plain chocolate candy-coated product was ultimately named M&M’s as a nod to Mars and Murrie’s surnames.
View this post on InstagramIn 1941, M&M’s Plain Chocolate Candies were introduced and initially sold just to the military before sales were expanded to the general public. Eight years later, Murrie sold his 20 percent stake in the company while Forrest continued to build M&M’s into a worldwide candy brand.
Once imitators began to emerge, Forrest came up the clever idea to stamp a small “m” on each piece of candy to differentiate his brand from knockoffs, according to the M&M’s website. M&M’s eventually became integrated into the Mars business.
Today, dozens of M&M’s flavors are available—everything from peanut M&M’s to limited-edition flavors such as red velvet, candy apple and gingerbread for the holidays.
And it all started with an emerging entrepreneur’s dream.
When Forrest Mars died in 1999 at age 95, not only did he have an estimated net worth of $4 billion, but he left behind a global confectionery empire that made M&M’s a household name. What began with a family falling out and an unlikely business partnership became one of the most recognizable candy brands in history.
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