Forrest Mars Sr., every mention

Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired Dec 16, 2024 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 57:15 David Rosenthal So, after a couple years, when Forrest graduates from Yale, he's ready to go put all this knowledge to work in his dad's candy business.
• ▶ 58:27 David Rosenthal But in his heart of hearts, he's not the same man that Forrest is.
• ▶ 58:46 David Rosenthal So the factory that he builds in Chicago on the inside is really state-of-the-art per Forrest's designs.
• ▶ 59:24 David Rosenthal Shows you the difference of where Frank's head is out and where Forrest's head is at.
• ▶ 59:49 David Rosenthal Forrest is pushing the workforce super hard.
• ▶ 1:01:44 David Rosenthal Forrest hates all of this.
• ▶ 1:03:17 David Rosenthal Supposedly, Forrest was thinking about what would be, like, you know, an incredible product to build on the Milky Way's success and market to all of America and the world.
• ▶ 1:06:27 David Rosenthal You know, Forrest, and I think it probably really was Forrest here, was
• ▶ 1:07:36 David Rosenthal Forrest, as great as he was at so many things, he was never a product innovator in the way that Frank was.
• ▶ 1:08:00 David Rosenthal That was Forrest's big contribution.
• ▶ 1:08:05 David Rosenthal Here we are, 1932, the worst years of the depression, and Forrest totally recognizes all this, like, we need to invest, invest, invest, pedal to the metal.
• ▶ 1:08:27 David Rosenthal According to Forrest, quote, my father says we're making enough money.
• ▶ 1:08:35 David Rosenthal And Forrest's reply to that is, quote, I want to conquer the whole goddamn world.
• ▶ 1:09:16 David Rosenthal Forrest was not liked within the company.
• ▶ 1:09:52 David Rosenthal Either way, there's quite a bit of animosity around this, and Forrest walks out, and in the process, tells his dad to quote, stick his business up his ass.
• ▶ 1:10:08 David Rosenthal So Forrest leaves town, not just Chicago, but leaves
• ▶ 1:10:53 David Rosenthal So Forrest takes these two sort of parting gifts, tells his dad that he'll never hear from him again, leaves America entirely, and super sadly, Frank doesn't ever hear from him again.
• ▶ 1:11:06 Ben Gilbert Yeah, this is the last time that Frank and Forrest would ever speak.
• ▶ 1:11:09 David Rosenthal Yeah, the next year, when Frank is just 50 years old, he collapses in the Chicago factory and dies of kidney failure, and Forrest doesn't come back for the funeral.
• ▶ 1:28:36 David Rosenthal I think how these started, maybe even back in England, Forrest started a, a document called The Mars Way, where he was like codifying all this.
• ▶ 1:29:03 David Rosenthal Forrest was completely obsessed with quality on every dimension.
• ▶ 1:30:40 David Rosenthal So anytime, if there was a mistake that Forrest then found that hadn't been caught on the line, he would just berate whoever should have stopped the line and be like, you needed to have stopped and fixed this.
• ▶ 1:31:14 David Rosenthal Forrest knows that if you can offer a higher quality for a given price than your competitors, you're just going to build a lead and compound forever and ever and ever in this business.
• ▶ 1:31:36 David Rosenthal For all of his crazy intensity, Forrest was not a micromanager.
• ▶ 1:33:22 David Rosenthal You get a 10% bonus if you are never late in the entire year, and it's everybody from Forrest himself on down.
• ▶ 1:34:06 Ben Gilbert Boy, Forrest really wants to rebel against his father.
• ▶ 1:35:04 David Rosenthal And Forrest is doing this in the thirties.
• ▶ 1:35:49 David Rosenthal Yeah, you can tell how pissed Forrest was at his dad about the Chicago factory specifically, but also just, like, how deep-seated this is.
• ▶ 1:36:03 David Rosenthal So Forrest obviously is like hyper competitive, but he also knows that this is an ecosystem that he's in, and the retailers are super important.
• ▶ 1:36:38 David Rosenthal Probably back to his whole mindset and time at Yale and studying DuPont, Forrest is crazy about studying business and management literature.
• ▶ 1:37:31 David Rosenthal So, while he's in England, Forrest reads a textbook called Higher Control in Management by T.G.
• ▶ 1:38:46 David Rosenthal The way Forrest does it, though, and the way the company still does it today is, no, that's insane.
• ▶ 1:40:23 David Rosenthal So, anyway, supposedly, Forest had, and Mars has, or at least used to have, a specific target of 18% return on total assets for every division and every factory, which means essentially that every investment needs to pay for itself in less…
• ▶ 1:40:56 David Rosenthal So it's like, in effect, any time Forrest is making a decision to invest in something, he's like, I want like four-year payback on this, four to five-year payback.
• ▶ 1:43:38 David Rosenthal So then that brings us to the last principle, which is freedom, which, you know, I think in the early days here, to the extent Forrest thought about this as a principle, like, I think it was just like, he wants to build his own business,…
• ▶ 1:44:01 David Rosenthal And then in the next generation after Forrest and beyond, it means being incredibly private.
• ▶ 1:45:21 David Rosenthal So, back to the Forrest Mars story in progress.
• ▶ 1:53:40 David Rosenthal Okay, so the legend is that the reason peanut butter M&M's are not as big as what you would think their market potential is in the U.S. is because Forrest Jr. and John Mars, the sons of Forrest Sr., who would take over,
• ▶ 1:54:26 David Rosenthal Forrest and the family have moved back to America
• ▶ 1:54:39 David Rosenthal And by pays a visit, in typical Forrest fashion, I mean that he shows up there anonymously and unannounced, and he signs up and does the public factory tour.
• ▶ 1:54:51 David Rosenthal So Forrest.
• ▶ 1:55:32 David Rosenthal To which Forrest replies,
• ▶ 1:55:50 David Rosenthal Yes, they're starting to wake up to that, but if this story is true, Forrest is saying, tell Murray that Mars is here.
• ▶ 1:56:02 Ben Gilbert Right, because his father's passed at this point, so the Mars that it probably is is whoever is running the Mars company.
• ▶ 1:56:14 David Rosenthal Either way, Forrest does get in to see William Murray, and Murray has never met Forrest before, but of course knows who he is once Forrest introduces himself, and Murray's like, um, great, okay, you're back in the U.S., what can I do for…
• ▶ 1:56:30 David Rosenthal Forrest then proceeds to theatrically remove a handkerchief from his pocket and place it down on Murray's desk.
• ▶ 1:56:51 David Rosenthal Uh, Forrest is like, try one.
• ▶ 1:56:57 David Rosenthal Forrest says, what if I told you that I have had these candies in my pocket all the way on the trip here from New York?
• ▶ 1:57:24 David Rosenthal So Forrest and William Murray work out a deal to start a new joint venture candy company that will be 80% owned by Forrest and 20% owned by Murray's son, Bruce.
• ▶ 1:57:41 David Rosenthal And Forrest says, I've even got the name for it.
• ▶ 1:57:52 David Rosenthal Obviously, Forrest is totally brilliant.
• ▶ 1:58:51 Ben Gilbert So Mars is dangling something he wants.
• ▶ 1:58:54 David Rosenthal Forrest is offering Murray the chance to have wealth and a legacy and a business
• ▶ 1:59:24 Ben Gilbert And Forrest Mars has this thing that, god, if you think the military liked count lines, they're gonna love these non-melt candy-coated chocolates.
• ▶ 2:00:31 David Rosenthal Yeah, when you think about if Forrest were to go to William Murray and say, hey, you and me enter into a partnership, that's at least going to be fifty-fifty, if not eighty-twenty Murray to Mars.
• ▶ 2:00:49 David Rosenthal So, Murray agrees to this, and in the spring of 1940, Forrest and Bruce Murray, the son, set up M&M Limited as a partnership.
• ▶ 2:01:16 Ben Gilbert This is how Forrest makes his return to the U.S.
• ▶ 2:01:26 David Rosenthal It's like, you want to say diabolical, but, like, I don't think Forrest is diabolical, per se.
• ▶ 2:03:43 David Rosenthal Forrest, of course, was not the only one to spot the potential of drage chocolates for military use and then eventually for public consumption.
• ▶ 2:03:53 David Rosenthal Well, like all things with Forrest history, it's a little bit hard to untangle truth from fiction, but one thing that is undeniably true
• ▶ 2:04:09 David Rosenthal So three to four years before M&M's startup in the U.S. and two years before Forrest even leaves the U.K.
• ▶ 2:04:25 David Rosenthal There is no way that Forrest did not see Smarties in the U.K. before he left.
• ▶ 2:05:06 David Rosenthal Apparently, Forrest and George Harris of Roundtree had both learned about Drage's around the same time, so during the Spanish Civil War, and supposedly they negotiated a gentleman's agreement that Roundtree could have the British market,
• ▶ 2:05:27 David Rosenthal And Forrest, who was at this point in time starting to plan to go back to the U.S. anyway,
• ▶ 2:05:35 David Rosenthal And in return, Forrest supposedly gave Roundtree the rights to manufacture and market Mars bars in other British Commonwealth countries like Canada and South Africa.
• ▶ 2:06:09 David Rosenthal Meanwhile, during the war, as M&M's is starting up, and the U.S. military is a big customer, and Forrest is sort of rebuilding his empire in America, he's on the lookout for his chappies equivalent to bring into the U.S.
• ▶ 2:06:51 David Rosenthal So there are also, as always, a couple versions of this story, but I think the one that is closest to the truth is that back when Forrest was in England,
• ▶ 2:07:19 David Rosenthal And in 1942, this chemist and Forrest form another joint venture company in Houston, Texas, and they patent the method in America and start producing rice to sell, just like M&M's, to the military.
• ▶ 2:08:23 David Rosenthal It was all these puzzle pieces that Forrest was assembling.
• ▶ 2:08:29 David Rosenthal After the war, Forrest and Bruce Murray, of course, now need to find new customers for M&Ms.
• ▶ 2:09:23 David Rosenthal This, of course, as you would imagine, creates quite a lot of tension between Forrest and Bruce, especially because Bruce was in charge of sales.
• ▶ 2:09:38 David Rosenthal So did you hear about what supposedly Forrest did to Bruce here?
• ▶ 2:09:45 David Rosenthal So the story is, as sales are not going well, Forrest orders Bruce to produce a daily report of the past day's sales of M&Ms in a written form to him every morning in the office.
• ▶ 2:10:01 David Rosenthal And every morning where the previous day's sales did not hit Forrest's target,
• ▶ 2:10:17 David Rosenthal We've obviously been very laudatory of Forrest, and he was incredible, incredible genius.
• ▶ 2:10:35 David Rosenthal People who worked for Forrest and the lots of accounts in Emperors of Chocolate and elsewhere about his temper and how awful he was, and he clearly was awful.
• ▶ 2:10:53 David Rosenthal So in 1949, four years after the end of the war and middling sales at best of M&Ms, Forrest finally succeeds in pushing Bruce out.
• ▶ 2:11:04 David Rosenthal And supposedly it comes down to a confrontation one day where Bruce is like, I can't take it anymore with Forrest, how you're treating me, you know, posting these reports in the men's bathroom.
• ▶ 2:11:19 David Rosenthal Forrest kicks Bruce out of the plant as, you know, security or whatever, come and take him out.
• ▶ 2:11:24 Ben Gilbert And Forrest is his boss.
• ▶ 2:11:25 Ben Gilbert I mean, this guy owns 20%, but Forrest is the CEO.
• ▶ 2:11:31 David Rosenthal So Bruce resigns, and then once Bruce resigns, after this, this starts the negotiations of Forrest buying out his 20% stake.
• ▶ 2:12:35 David Rosenthal As soon as Forrest completes the purchase and kicks Bruce out of the company, takes a hundred percent ownership, he goes in 1950 and hires the ad agency Ted Bates and Company
• ▶ 2:12:55 David Rosenthal So other big diversified CPG companies like Procter & Gamble, they were starting to do the sophisticated kind of market research here, like we're talking about, you know, the legendary Procter & Gamble product management function.
• ▶ 2:21:34 David Rosenthal So, speaking of empire-minded, at this point, Forrest's empire is pretty much complete.
• ▶ 2:21:40 David Rosenthal He's got the most popular candy bar in the UK with the Mars bar.
• ▶ 2:21:59 David Rosenthal In the US, obviously he's got M&Ms, which are now the number one candy in the US.
• ▶ 2:22:04 David Rosenthal He's crushing it there.
• ▶ 2:22:06 David Rosenthal He's got the biggest and pretty much the only pet food business in the entire world.
• ▶ 2:22:11 David Rosenthal He's also got the biggest and only branded rice business.
• ▶ 2:22:16 David Rosenthal All told, all of his sets of companies, I believe here now in the, call it mid to late 19 fifties, are doing like
• ▶ 2:22:28 David Rosenthal However, there are two things that he still doesn't have.
• ▶ 2:22:39 Ben Gilbert And he owns, what, ten-ish percent around this point?
• ▶ 2:22:42 David Rosenthal But he doesn't control the company.
• ▶ 2:22:44 David Rosenthal And then two, of course, is fully separating himself from Hershey's and controlling all the means of production for all of his American businesses and making his own chocolate in America.
• ▶ 2:22:56 Ben Gilbert Right, because if Hershey's cut him off, M&M's would be screwed.
• ▶ 2:22:59 Ben Gilbert He has a big liability there.
• ▶ 2:23:07 David Rosenthal And probably also knowing Forrest was strategic when he chose to push Bruce out of the business, because I believe William Murray had already retired from Hershey's at that point.
• ▶ 2:23:21 David Rosenthal It would be like Forrest to plan all that out to a T.
• ▶ 2:29:06 Ben Gilbert And just as a, like, a side note here, it's pretty insane that Forrest is able to, out of his pocket, without external financing, go and buy up two-thirds of a business that is doing forty million a year in revenue.