The Candy Empire That Refused to Go Public

On a late-summer night in 1923, in a dim corner diner in Minneapolis, a forty-year-old candy maker named Frank Mars sat stirring a malted milkshake and contemplating failure. His company, the Mar-O-Bar Co., was foundering; its signature confection was too fragile to survive shipping. Then the door swung open and a lanky nineteen-year-old stepped inside. “Dad?” the young man ventured. Frank looked up into the face of his son, Forrest, whom he had not seen in thirteen years.

The reunion was not sentimental in origin. Forrest, selling Camel cigarettes in Chicago for the summer, had plastered the city with advertising posters, been arrested for it, and—alone and out of options—had phoned the father he barely knew. Frank drove hundreds of miles through the night to bail him out. Now they sat over milkshakes, trading careful small talk, until Frank asked what his son planned to do next. Forrest looked at the glass in his hand. Why not, he suggested, half in jest, put the taste of a malted milkshake into a chocolate bar?

Frank stared at the half-melted shake. A milkshake inside a candy bar sounded fanciful—and possible. Neither man could have guessed that the idle remark would rescue a failing business, seed one of history’s great private fortunes, and set off one of the strangest father-son wars in American commerce.

The Nougat House

Frank Mars had loved candy since boyhood. Born to a Minnesota farm family in the 1880s and left unable to run the fields by childhood polio, he learned at his mother’s stove to melt chocolate and hand-dip sweets. The affection outlasted a string of failures. He peddled taffy in Wadena, Minnesota, for a pittance; he moved to Tacoma, Washington, and struggled as a candy wholesaler. Around 1910 his first wife, Ethel G. Kissack, divorced him—their son Forrest was six—reportedly asking, in parting, what a candy dream was worth if he could not keep the household fed.

Frank remarried, to a second Ethel, and started over in Tacoma in 1911, hand-making cream-centered candies in a workshop the couple called the Nougat House. Around 1920 they returned to the Midwest, to Minneapolis, where Frank named a line of hand-dipped chocolates for his daughter, Patricia, and launched his first chocolate bar, the Mar-O-Bar. It was no triumph, but it kept the lights on—until that night in 1923 handed him something better.

Back home, Frank and his head candy maker, Thomas Dattalo, tested formula after formula until they had a bar of malted nougat and caramel sheathed in chocolate. Frank called it Milky Way—a nod to the milkshake, not the galaxy. Launched in 1924, it did $800,000 in sales its first year, a figure worth tens of millions today. Frank bought a grand house that neighborhood children nicknamed the Milky Way house, because trick-or-treaters got full-size bars. In 1929 he moved the company to Chicago, promising employees “the most beautiful candy factory in America,” and built a white Spanish-style plant amid lawns in the Galewood district. In 1930 came Snickers—peanuts added to the formula, named, family lore holds, for a beloved racehorse. Two years later came 3 Musketeers, originally three pieces in vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate, later reduced by wartime shortages to chocolate alone.

“This Company Isn’t Big Enough for Both of Us”

Forrest, meanwhile, had graduated from Yale in industrial engineering and joined the firm. The Depression sharpened the differences between them: Frank believed in showmanship, fine packaging, and palatial factories; Forrest preached efficiency, cost-cutting, and expansion. In 1932, on a dark afternoon in the office, Forrest demanded an immediate one-third ownership stake. Frank slammed the desk. By the family’s later accounts he shook with rage and told his son the company could not hold them both—Forrest could get out of the country and build something of his own. Forrest, equally furious, shouted back an obscenity about what his father could do with the business, and slammed the door on his way out.

Yet at the parting, the father’s severity cracked. He pressed $50,000 in cash on his son and signed over the Milky Way formula rights for the British market. In the late autumn of 1932, Forrest, twenty-eight, sailed for England with his wife, Audrey, and their two-year-old son, Forrest Jr. In Slough, west of London, he rented a shabby workshop, hired twelve workers, and reformulated his father’s bar for British tastes—sweeter, heavier on the syrup. He named it, in tribute and in defiance, the Mars Bar, and sold it shopkeeper to shopkeeper from a basket. Within two years the business was thriving, and he answered to no one.

He was also, his employees discovered, a tyrant—raging over a slow hand or a crooked wrapper, driven by something that looked less like ambition than a vow. In the early winter of 1934 a long-distance call brought the news: Frank Mars had died suddenly in a Baltimore hospital at fifty-one. Forrest reportedly stood in silence, hung up, and went back to work. He did not attend the funeral. The will confirmed his exile: nearly everything went to the second Ethel and to Patricia, almost nothing to the eldest son. Two parallel Mars empires now faced each other across the Atlantic—and in 1936 the Chicago company introduced its own American “Mars” bar, studded with almonds, unrelated to Forrest’s British bestseller. The mismatched products were the family rupture rendered in chocolate.

The Long Road Back

Forrest returned to the United States in 1939, sensing what war would demand: chocolate that could travel without melting. In 1940, in Newark, New Jersey, he began producing candy-coated chocolate pellets inspired by rations he had once seen soldiers eating in Spain. To secure cocoa he took a partner, Bruce Murrie, son of Hershey’s president—hence M&M’s, for Mars and Murrie. The candies shipped with American troops to Europe; after the war, the slogan “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand” carried them into every corner store in America. Forrest had also bought Chappel Bros., a British canner of dog food, in 1935, pioneering industrial pet food, and after the war he launched Uncle Ben’s converted rice. By the mid-1950s his businesses were doing roughly $200 million a year. The Chicago company his father built was doing about $50 million.

Still it gnawed at him. When his stepmother died in 1945, Forrest and his half sister Patricia each inherited roughly a third of the original firm, managers holding the rest—but Patricia ran it, installing her uncle, William Kruppenbacher, as president. Forrest took an office in the Chicago plant, fired off scathing memos, and prowled the factory floor unannounced. After Kruppenbacher retired in 1959, Patricia handed the presidency to her third husband, James Fleming, and sales slid from about $50 million to just over $40 million by 1963, as Patricia herself fell ill with cancer. That summer Forrest flew to San Diego and told her plainly the company was headed for ruin. She agreed to sell him her shares on two conditions: her husband would not be fired, and the combined enterprise would carry their father’s name—Mars, Incorporated. By mid-1964, having bought out the remaining holders, Forrest, past sixty, owned it all. He had spent thirty years purchasing his own inheritance.

The Wagon Wheel

What followed became business legend. Within days Forrest ripped out the executive dining room, fired the French chef, sold the company helicopter, and stripped the carpets, oil paintings, and oak paneling from the offices. Everyone, family included, punched a time clock; lateness cost 10 percent of a day’s pay. Titles were abolished, secretaries eliminated, private offices torn out in favor of an open floor arranged like a wagon wheel, executives at the hub. Pay was rebuilt around results: bonuses could reach several weeks’ salary, managers’ base pay rose about 30 percent, and profit, he decreed, was the only goal.

His rages were as famous as his reforms. At one management meeting he ordered a participant—one of his own sons—to kneel and pray aloud for the company while the room watched in silence; the young man reportedly stayed on his knees for an hour, until certain his father had driven away. Veterans whispered that they were watching 1932 replay itself, with the roles reversed. In the early 1970s the three children—Forrest Jr., John, and Jacqueline—together pressed their father to step back. He raged, then relented, retiring in 1973 to build a small handmade-chocolate works in Henderson, Nevada, named Ethel M, for his mother. In 1989 he wrote to descendants of Thomas Dattalo admitting that the Milky Way idea had originated with his father, and recalling Frank’s advice: you can hire people for law and finance, but no one can learn candy-making for you.

The Quiet Generations

The third generation took over without ceremony, from an unmarked headquarters in McLean, Virginia, that insiders nicknamed the Kremlin. They set two rules at the outset: the company would never go public, and it would run on the Five Principles their father had preached—quality, responsibility, mutuality, efficiency, freedom—formally codified in the 1980s. The most radical, mutuality, traced to a 1947 letter in which Forrest declared that the company existed to create mutual benefit for consumers, distributors, suppliers, employees, even competitors and governments—with shareholders listed last. John Mars would put the heresy to his executives as a question in 2006: What should be the right level of profit? Quality meant “the consumer is our boss”; in 2016 the company recalled millions of products worldwide over a single sliver of plastic, at a cost in the tens of millions. Freedom was the keystone: we need freedom to shape our future, the principle runs, and profit to remain free. Private ownership let Mars reinvest more than 90 percent of profits and, as the family says, think in generations rather than quarters.

The siblings ran the empire in that spirit—Forrest Jr. the “silent engineer” on the factory floor, John the strategist, Jacqueline the keeper of board and culture—while living with conspicuous plainness. Forrest Jr.’s daughter Pamela recalled a childhood of chores and school runs, indistinguishable from her friends’. The company grew relentlessly: M&M’s flew with the first space-shuttle crews in 1981, the first candy in space; Dove was acquired in 1986; Pedigree and Whiskas spread worldwide as Mars planted operations in China, Russia, and Brazil. When the patriarch died in Miami on July 1, 1999, at ninety-five, one of his children reportedly observed that their father had been like his own chocolate—a hard, bitter shell around something soft. Forrest Jr. retired that same year; John stepped down in 2001 as the last family CEO. Professional managers now run the business, but the family holds the board, and in 2008—mid-financial-crisis—it swallowed the chewing-gum giant Wrigley for $23 billion, a deal quietly sealed by John Mars, then in his seventies, financed by family money and bank loans, with Warren Buffett briefly holding a stake under its structure. Today Mars employs more than 70,000 people in over 100 countries; Fortune, granted rare access in 2013, described America’s third-largest private company as a realm of free chocolate and office dogs, staffed by loyalists who call themselves Martians and rarely leave—turnover runs around 5 percent. John retired to rural Wyoming and received an honorary British knighthood in 2015; Jacqueline bred horses in Virginia and gave $5 million to the National Museum of American History; Forrest Jr. died in 2016, leaving his stake equally to his four daughters.

The Photograph

At the company’s centennial in 2011, Victoria Mars—Forrest Jr.’s eldest daughter, a Yale graduate who started in quality control and served as the company’s first ombudsman before chairing the board—told the assembled family and employees that in a hundred years everything had changed except the values. Her generation has bent the old secrecy without breaking the old vows. Stephen Badger, Jacqueline’s son and twice chairman, pushed the company to publish its first public annual report in 2017, conceding that consumers now want to know the company behind the brand—a shift hastened by criticism of the industry’s opacity on cocoa-supply-chain labor. That year the family committed $1 billion to a sustainability plan; in 2020 it quietly gave some $26 million for pandemic relief. But Pamela Mars has said flatly that Mars will never list: the family regards the company not as an asset but as a mission.

On the desks of the fourth generation sits a black-and-white photograph: a father and a son in a diner in 1923, a malted milkshake between them. Asked why she treasures it, Victoria has said that hard decisions get easier when she looks at it. It has been said that the family’s history is itself a filled chocolate—a glossy commercial shell around a dense center of grievance, longing, and reconciliation. The Mars formula, in the end, is the one printed on every bag: know what to hold on to, and what to let melt.