Wherever fine candies
are sold across Europe and Canada, you can easily find little drops of
chocolate coated with brightly colored candy shells, produced in eight
different colors, that were introduced by the British H. I. Rowntree Company in
1937. These popular candies are called Smarties, and are made by the
Swiss food conglomerate Nestlé today.
You can’t find Smarties in the United States—not the chocolate kind,
anyway. The Smarties found in America
are small tablet candies produced in New Jersey by the Smarties Candy Company.
(They’re called Rockets in Canada, to make sure you don’t confuse them
with the chocolate candies.)
If you want something
like Smarties in the United States, you have to seek out M&Ms, which have
been manufactured by Mars Incorporated since 1941, launched that year as a
shameless ripoff of the British confection. M&Ms only had five
colors: red, yellow, green, violet, and brown.
M&Ms were one of Mars’s most successful candies right from the
beginning, and remain so today.
One of Mars’s first big
customers for M&Ms was the US Army. Army rations usually included
chocolate, providing necessary calories to GIs while on campaigns, usually in
bar form. One problem with chocolate bars is that they melt in hot weather. That wasn’t that much of an issue in Europe,
but for military campaigns in the tropics, which included most of the Pacific
Theater, it was. The Army saw M&Ms as a solution to this problem,
since the candies weren’t as prone to melt, being protected by their hard chocolate
shell. During World War II, which the
United States joined in December 1941, just three months after M&Ms were
first introduced, the Army was the the largest purchaser of M&Ms, and it
bought a lot of them.
An M&Ms
advertisement from the World War II era, promoting M&Ms with wartime
patriotic fervor.
After the war was over,
Mars’s M&M production centered on civilians again. In 1949, they
introduced their slogan “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” (At age
five, I used science to test this. I learned
that on a hot day, if you ball up your fists with a number of M&Ms and some
pennies, they will definitely melt, and will not taste very good afterward,
especially after spending additional time at the bottom of your pocket on a hot
summer day. I am not aware if Mars has ever included this disclaimer with
their products.) In 1950, M&Ms
started to feature a black M stamped on each one, giving them a distinguished
look. The M stamp was changed to white
in 1954, and the candies got the look they more or less have today.
More or less. The
violet M&Ms disappeared in 1949, quietly replaced by tan ones.
M&Ms were manufactured in the same five colors for several decades
afterward. (Peanut M&Ms, introduced in 1954, originally came only in
tan, but started to include the other colors in 1960.) The M&M color
lineup was disturbed again in 1975 when Soviet scientists reported that red dye
No. 2, also known as amaranth, was linked to cancer, causing a public health
scare. It was for this reason that Mars discontinued red M&Ms. Mars did not in fact use red dye No. 2 in
M&Ms, but since they were afraid that public backlash against their red
candies might follow anyway, the red dye was promptly pulled and replaced with
a new orange dye, which became M&Ms’ new standard color.
The idea that red
M&Ms contained a carcinogen was misinformation that Mars took action to
head off, but there were other pieces of misinformation that they took no
action on, nor could they. Specifically, M&Ms had quite a bit of
superstition surrounding them. The
company claims it had no hand in promoting these superstitions, insisting that
these were invented by the consumers.
Some of the choice M&M superstitions were:
- If the last candy out of the bag is red, make a wish and it will come true.
- If the last candy out of the bag is yellow, call in sick to work and stay home.
- Orange M&Ms are good luck.
- Brown M&Ms are bad luck.
Green M&Ms had a
special superstition, themselves. Or, rather, a false scientific belief
that they were actually aphrodisiacs. This rumor spread in the 1970s,
particularly among college students, who were said to have plucked green
M&Ms out of bags of the candy in order to seduce other co-eds. There
was never any truth to this, but the rumor persists to this day, with other
green candies getting assigned aphrodisiac properties, like gummi bears and
jelly beans.
Green M&Ms got
something of a reprieve from this reputation in 1976, when the red ones
disappeared. Since Mars kept making its public claim that they didn’t use
the carcinogenic red dye No. 2, people figured that the company must be hiding
something, because why take any action at all if there’s nothing to worry
about? The rumor started that it was the red M&Ms that were the
aphrodisiacs, and Mars was just taking action before they were hit with a
lawsuit over it.
Red M&Ms, though
gone, were not easily forgotten. In 1982, a freshman at the University of
Tennessee, Paul Hethmon, was looking for a way connect with his friends back
home, since he was bored at college and he missed them. That’s when he
drafted a form letter inviting his friends to The Society for the Restoration
and Preservation of Red M&Ms.
Hethmon was not actually setting out to bring red M&Ms back. The
letters were just a spoof on form letters, which were very common at the
time. Today they clog our email inboxes,
but they were common back in the days when you still needed a stamp to mail a
letter. Such letters would invite people to join societies for a small
fee, or urge them to make copies of the letter and pass them on in order to get
rewarded with good luck—often brought by a saint, or Jesus, or some other
commonly accepted entity of supernatural goodness. Hethmon’s friends
appreciated the joke, and it breathed life into their mutual correspondences. Hethmon started issuing membership cards for
the Society, and by accident, a movement was born.
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A society that would
have you as a member: for just 99¢, you could join, too!
The college paper at the
University of Tennessee wrote a story about the Society. The story was
then picked up by Seventeen magazine, and was then picked up by The
Wall Street Journal. Hethmon soon had journalists calling him for
interviews, and before long found himself flooded with membership applications
for the Society from around the United States and around the English-speaking
world. He started sending cards out everywhere, as far away as Hong Kong
and Australia. Postage cost more to send
the cards such a long distance, so for international members, he had to raise
the 99¢ one-time membership fee. Part of the mission of the Society was
to write to prominent people everywhere, as well as to the Mars company,
imploring them to do all they can to bring back red M&Ms.
On January 9, 1987,
Hethmon received a letter from the Mars company congratulating him on his
efforts, and letting him know that red M&Ms were being restored. Soon
after, he received a shipment of 50 pounds of red M&Ms. Anyone else who wanted red ones would have to
buy a bag of M&Ms for 35¢ at the 7-11, where the red ones joined the other
five colors. It was a new era.
M&Ms would drop
another color, in time. In 1995, Mars held a promotion asking people what
color M&M they’d like to see added to the mix, since tan M&Ms were
going to be retired. Voters were given a choice between purple, pink and blue. The “election” generated a lot of interest,
with Mars getting plenty of free publicity from daytime and late night talk
shows discussing the color change. It was a big news story when the blue
victory was announced. Even the Empire
State Building was lit up blue that evening.
It was in 1995 when
M&Ms introduced its cartoon M&M mascots that are still in use today as
the M&Ms line’s “spokescandies”. Red M&M was voiced by John
Lovitt for a year, and since then, by versatile voice actor Billy West. John Goodman was the original voice of Yellow
M&M, replaced by Law & Order actor J. K. Simmons. Other
stars of this big-budget marketing campaign include (or included) Phil Hartman,
Cree Summer, and Vanessa Williams.
M&Ms’
“spokescandies” were given personalities by the Mars marketing team.
Vampy Green plays into the “aphrodisiac” myth. Wisecracking Red, dopey yellow, and hip Blue
show no such connections.
If you want more than
six colors of M&Ms, Mars offers up to 22 varieties. You can find them
at their M&M stores, or order them directly online. There is still no effort to revive the tan
M&M, perhaps because they’re still available this way.
You might think that
Mars are marketing geniuses with the way it’s handled publicity over the past
couple of decades, and maybe that’s true. But one big mistake came in
1982, when Steven Spielberg approached the company to ask permission to use
M&Ms in the upcoming film E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. Mars
declined, so Spielberg asked Hershey if they would allow a similar-looking
candy for use as a major plot point in the picture. Hershey was glad to
allow Spielberg to use Reese’s Pieces, which were a relatively new candy,
having just been introduced in 1978, and were much less well known than
M&Ms. Reese’s Pieces enjoyed a sudden boots in their popularity as a
result, giving the candy a 65% increase in sales over a three-month
period. It’s hard to say if the candy
would ever have taken off the way it did, otherwise.
A missed opportunity:
Reese’s Pieces beat out M&Ms in one of the greatest product placement
success stories in history.
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