Forrest Mars Sr., every mention

Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired Dec 16, 2024 · 31 mentions

• ▶ 2:30:32 David Rosenthal And once that happens, Forrest fires James and makes himself CEO of the entire empire, all united, finally, under Mars Incorporated.
• ▶ 2:31:05 Ben Gilbert Forest is the captain now.
• ▶ 2:31:18 David Rosenthal Okay, this now brings us to Forrest's final conquest, which is making his own chocolate in America and fully ditching Hershey's.
• ▶ 2:32:55 David Rosenthal So, Forrest gives his Chicago plant managers a deadline of six months to start making their own chocolate in the factory, and I suspect they turn profitable on this decision a lot faster than 10 years out, but there are obviously other…
• ▶ 2:33:37 David Rosenthal The other reason that I think Forrest always had the dream of making his own chocolate is to be able to scale as large as possible.
• ▶ 2:38:53 Ben Gilbert Reflecting back on this period of time, thinking about Forrest Mars, this sort of was the moment in world history for the global scale economy's founder to rise.
• ▶ 2:39:15 Ben Gilbert There are things that would have been non-economic before in addressing these small regional markets, but now that you're distributing everywhere, and America is a huge market on its own, finally, and beyond that international, you sort of…
• ▶ 2:39:52 David Rosenthal So, now that Forrest finally has his own chocolate-making means of production, how do they finally knock off Hershey's?
• ▶ 2:43:51 David Rosenthal So Forrest is like, oh, man.
• ▶ 2:44:00 David Rosenthal Because he now decides that in response,
• ▶ 2:44:03 David Rosenthal He is not only going to increase his advertising and blitz the nation with M&Ms and Mars products, he's also gonna increase the size of his bars while keeping price the same.
• ▶ 2:44:16 David Rosenthal And he starts a price and size war with Hershey.
• ▶ 2:48:05 David Rosenthal And a pretty surprising twist happens here in Forrest's story, which is the end.
• ▶ 2:49:14 David Rosenthal So, Forrest spends the rest of the decade of the seventies in retirement.
• ▶ 2:49:41 David Rosenthal So in 1980, when Forrest is 76 years old, he decides he's getting back in the game.
• ▶ 2:50:22 David Rosenthal Well, so Forrest's business plan in starting ethylm is basically to build a competitor to C's.
• ▶ 2:51:05 David Rosenthal So, Forrest, as always, decides he's all in on this.
• ▶ 2:51:31 David Rosenthal And Forrest, by God, builds a factory there outside of Las Vegas, builds an apartment directly above the factory, and lives in the apartment above the factory from which he runs the business.
• ▶ 2:52:04 David Rosenthal Now, as you said, Ben, it's not competing with Mars in any way, it's competing with seas, but the business gets so big and Mars and Forrest's children decide that they want to own this business.
• ▶ 2:52:18 David Rosenthal After Forrest has been running it for seven, eight years, Mars acquires Ethylem for an undisclosed amount.
• ▶ 2:52:29 David Rosenthal For those negotiations between Forrest and his children.
• ▶ 2:55:24 David Rosenthal So during their tenure, by the time they hand the business over to professional management in 2001, they've grown it from, you know, that eight hundred million when Forrest left to twenty billion in revenue.
• ▶ 2:56:28 Ben Gilbert I mean, we told this whole story about Forrest Sr.
• ▶ 2:56:40 David Rosenthal Now, that said, while globalization was, I'm sure, a Herculean task and required a lot of vision and commitment to it from the brothers, it really was, outside of the M&A, was about globalizing all the successful brands that Forrest had…
• ▶ 3:14:52 Ben Gilbert I mean, if you look back, it was the year after Forrest Mars founded the UK division, is when they bought the first dog food, which was almost immediately cash generative.
• ▶ 3:20:53 David Rosenthal There's actually great stories about Forrest, perhaps both himself, but also through
• ▶ 3:20:58 David Rosenthal Employees and outside firms he'd hire would come up with all these technical improvements to the manufacturing equipment, but they would never patent it because he didn't want to tip off any competitors.
• ▶ 3:23:57 David Rosenthal So, I wonder, A, if Forrest would have made a different decision, and also B, if the brothers would have made a different decision had they had a little more confidence in their own security and their own place as CEOs.
• ▶ 3:38:16 David Rosenthal One, man, Forrest Sr. was such a freaking G.
• ▶ 3:39:20 David Rosenthal You know, everything that Forrest was doing,
• ▶ 3:40:33 Ben Gilbert And what I mean by that is, could you do all of the things that Forrest Mars did to create a company like this today?