Choco Dotsties!

I don't want you to think I get all my Many Deep and Varied Thoughts from the New York Post. But it an interesting paper. Sometimes they have the best exposés, of course, and are willing to publish stories that the rest of the media would rather bury. Sometimes, though, they're just dumb. 

As we barrel down the chute to the various candy seasons of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, the paper thought it was time to shock its readers with a bit of information that has always been readily available online and isn't all that interesting. Brace yourself: 

M&M’s fans discover meaning behind the chocolate’s name

And here's the bombshell:

The two ‘M’s in the name actually represent Forrest E. Mars Sr. – the founder of Mars – and Bruce Murrie, the son of Hershey Chocolate’s president William F. R. Murrie.

Now, to be fair, this article was originally published in Australia by another Rupert Murdoch outlet. M&M's is the little candy that started in the United States and spread all over the world, and the story of how it was invented may be less familiar to our friends down under. 

In a nutshell, or in a candy shell as it were, per Wikipedia:

Forrest Mars Sr., son of the Mars Company founder, Frank C. Mars, copied the idea for the candy in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War when he saw soldiers eating British-made Smarties, chocolate pellets with a colored shell of what confectioners call hard panning (essentially hardened sugar syrup) surrounding the outside, preventing the sweets (candies) from melting. Mars received a patent for his own process on March 3, 1941. Production began in 1941 in a factory located at 285 Badger Avenue in Clinton Hill, Newark, New Jersey. When the company was founded it was M&M Limited. The two 'M's represent the names of Forrest E. Mars Sr., the founder of Newark Company, and Bruce Murrie, son of Hershey Chocolate's president William F. R. Murrie, who had a 20 percent share in the product.

I got to thinking about this story, about the famous names connected to candy, namely Hershey and Mars. Both became famous because the inventors put their names on their popular chocolate bars. You didn't ask the candy butcher for a slender American-style milk chocolate bar; you asked for a Hershey bar. Back then, companies were named after their founders, men who wanted fame for a successful venture, but also were proud to back their products for quality. If you put your name on something and it sucked, people knew whom to blame. Further, putting your name on a product helped protect it -- someone could steal the formula for the Mars bar, but they wouldn't steal the name of its inventor.

Interestingly, that doesn't happen with a lot of confections now. Now, for ease of soliciting a trademark and for consumer memorization, companies tend to name their products something weird that will indicate in a way what it is. For example, Smash Mallow, which I sampled here in 2018. You know it's going to be a mashup by the name, and that it's going to be marshmallow. And it's a phrase that didn't exist before, so that makes it easier to obtain trademark. If M&M's were invented now, they might be called Choco Dotsties!

The exception to this rule is snacks. Those carry the inventors' names. The Great Lileks mentioned these "boo-teek" snacks the other day on the Bleat, "Amanda's Kettle-Baked Chips or Monica's Pita Fragments, the ones that always have a story about someone who had an idea and a passion".

This seems to have started with Annie Withey, who founded Annie's Homegrown in 1989. Her products became quite popular -- so much so that General Mills bought the company for $820 million in 2014. Now everybody wants to come up with a snack idea that will get popular traction, get the attention of a food conglomerate, and cash out. 

I know I do. If I can just perfect my recipe for Frederick's Chocolate Lima Bean Snack Surprise, I can retire, I just know it! Watch for it in your local supermarket. 

Meanwhile, I wonder if the Mars company is ready for a big takeover. This photo also ran in the Post: 

Sure, Elon may have been talking about the planet Mars. Or maybe he's in the mood to snap up some chocolatey goodness....