Mars Inc. (the chocolate story)
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Okay, David, how many current varieties of M&Ms can you name?
Oh, wow. Okay, well, plain, peanut, peanut butter.
Actually, plain is technically now called milk chocolate.
Oh, interesting. There's dark, right?
Yep, which I've got right here.
They had mint for a while. Did they discontinue mint?
Mint is a holiday-only theme. So that's a seasonal one.
Oh, what else? I mean, at the end of the day, it's kind of only plain and peanut that matter, right?
I think in sales numbers. Are there pretzel ones? There are pretzel ones. There are also almond.
Oh, almond. See, I'm allergic to almonds, so I never think about almonds.
There's also some weird ones. Caramel?
Yeah.
I don't want that at all, but they make it. Crunchy Cookie, which replaced Crispy of our youth. Do you remember the blue packaging, Crispy M&Ms?
Oh, yeah, I remember the Crispys, yeah.
And then there's some specialty ones, Dark Chocolate Peanut, which I really want, Fudge Brownie, Campfire S'mores, and Caramel Cold Brew. Ooh, I don't know about any of these. And then there's these really wild limited edition ones, in addition to Holiday Mint, Birthday Cake, Chili Nut, and Pumpkin Spice Latte. That sounds disgusting. I know. But yes, I think you are right. The milk chocolate and the peanut are the sales drivers. Yep. All right. Should we do it? Let's do it.
Yeah.
Welcome to the fall 2024 season finale of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. Listeners, we were thinking, what episode would be fun to do before the holidays? We picked M&M's, thinking this will be just some nice lighthearted fare about the candies and the characters on commercials that remind us all of our childhood. But as we dug into Mars Inc., the parent company, we realized that the story is totally thrilling. It's got World War I, World War II, new technologies and inventions, and serious, serious family drama. And their corporate strategy over the years is just as clever as companies like LVMH, Walmart, and Costco. I mean, you don't get to be the second wealthiest family in America without it.
Yeah, seriously. Maybe it's because we just did it, but I feel like there are a lot of echoes of IKEA in this one, too.
Absolutely. And the Mars family is way more quiet and reclusive than the Comprod family, too.
They're way more quiet and reclusive than anybody.
Yeah. Mars also owns way more than you think. You may know that they own the world's most popular candy, Snickers, in addition to M&M's. Or perhaps you know they're in the pet food business. But they also own everything from Ben's original rice to now Kind bars, and they have one massive deal in the works that we will talk about later on this episode. David, here's one crazy stat to illustrate their sheer size. Do you know Mars now does more revenue than the Coca-Cola company?
No. Wild.
Mars crossed $50 billion in sales last year, and they're still completely privately owned by the Mars family, making it one of the top five largest private companies in America. This really is an incredible American and global story. Well, listeners, after this episode, come listen to ACQ2. We just had one of my favorite conversations ever on the show, in part because I just love talking computer architecture, with Rene Haas, who is the CEO of Arm Holdings, the chip design company that makes the designs and the instruction set architecture of everything inside your smartphone, your car, your laptop, and now even massively in the data centers.
Gosh, between Synopsys and now ARM, we're going to have to rename ACQ2 into like acquired semiconductors.
Totally. It was a great computer science lesson and history lesson sort of all rolled into one. So go subscribe to the ACQ2 feed in the podcast player of your choice to check it out. We've got a survey winner. Thank you to everyone who took our survey. It is Kurti from Boston. We will email you with details on how to claim your free Ray-Ban metas.
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