Ever wonder why you can't stop eating those M&M's? Well, its not simply a matter of will power. The chocolate inside M&M's is specially engineered to keep consumers "grazing" -- the unconscious act of grabbing for your second, third or fifteenth handful. Thousands of hours of research have gone into the candy to make sure it promotes "maximum consumption."
As many chocoholics probably suspect, chocolate contains numerous mood altering chemicals. In the 1940s and 50s, Hershey extracted a stimulant called theobromine from its cocoa beans and sold it to Coca Cola, which used it to pep up its soda.
The secretive Mars family, whose members have rarely been photographed and zealously guard their privacy, has a fortune estimated at more than $12 billion, making them one of the richest families in the world -- all from the sale of frivolous products like M&M's, Snickers, Starburst, Twix, and Milky Way bars!
At Mars, product quality is an obsession. Workers constantly taste each product to ensure it is being properly made. Having to eat a Snickers each hour is one thing, but Mars is also the world's largest pet food manufacturer. Every day, Mars workers taste Bowser's chow to make sure it meets the company's standards.
Walking through a candy factory and sampling goods fresh off the production line is not what you might expect. Some candies need to age, like a fine wine, to reach their full potential. A 3 Musketeers, for example, has the consistency of a chewy taffy when it is first produced. Similarly, a freshly made Starburst is impossible to chew, and a Skittle fresh from the production line could break your teeth.
Milton Hershey made an incredible fortune -- more than $60 million at the turn of the century (when this was real money!) -- but he died penniless. Long before his death, he gave away everything he owned to found a home for orphaned boys.
Milton Hershey was an affable inventor who never stopped developing new products. In his later years, however, his creations became eccentric, even bizarre. For example, Hershey worked on onion and beet flavored sherbets (which he even, briefly, put on the menu in the Hershey Hotel).
Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are Hershey's biggest seller, but in the 1950s, the company tried a chocolate marshmallow cup that showed real promise. Unfortunately, the product had to be discontinued -- the marshmallow filling had a tendency to explode when shipped over the high altitude of the Rocky Mountains.
Mars has an extensive intelligence unit, using the most sophisticated technology to keep a step ahead of its rivals. The company has even recruited the CIA to help it keep abreast of world developments. In 1981, the spy agency produced a special report on the Soviet chocolate market for Mars -- despite CIA policies which forbid the agency from responding to such requests.
Mars's M&M factory in Hackettstown, New Jersey, operates seven days a week, 24 hours a day. The plant produces 100 million M&M's every eight hours. That's 300 million M&M's a day, 100 billion M&M's a year. (It is not true that the white "m" on each M&M is painted by a former Keebler elf.)
Hershey and Mars were once partners. The breakup of their partnership left bitter feelings within each company, which time has only deepened -- leading to one of the fiercest rivalries in business today.
-SportiAngel-
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