Forrest Mars, every mention

Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired Dec 16, 2024 · 90 mentions

• ▶ 9:02 David Rosenthal But, for the moment, the two of them have a son named Forrest.
• ▶ 9:07 David Rosenthal Forrest Mars.
• ▶ 9:12 David Rosenthal But put a pin in Forrest.
• ▶ 11:12 David Rosenthal His wife Ethel divorces him and takes their six-year-old son Forrest and sends Forrest off to live with her parents in a remote mining town in Saskatchewan, Canada.
• ▶ 11:36 Ben Gilbert And in particular, Frank actually owed her 20 dollars a month for child support for Forrest when he was six years old, but was failing to make payments, and so she just couldn't support him and needed to send him to the grandparents.
• ▶ 42:10 David Rosenthal But then, the next year, in the summer of 1923, a fateful reunion occurs in Frank's life, which is that his estranged son, Forrest Mars, reappears in highly dramatic fashion, and the two of them team up, father and son,
• ▶ 45:06 Ben Gilbert Alright, David, so Forrest emerges into his father's life, and somehow we end up with the Milky Way.
• ▶ 45:17 David Rosenthal Young Forrest Mars is 19 years old, and on summer break from college, more on college in a minute,
• ▶ 45:49 David Rosenthal Forrest, you gotta go blitz the whole city with posters marketing camel cigarettes.
• ▶ 45:56 David Rosenthal So Forrest goes around, and he puts billboards up all over downtown Chicago.
• ▶ 46:23 David Rosenthal And it lands young Forrest in jail.
• ▶ 46:26 David Rosenthal So, from his Chicago prison cell, Forrest makes his one phone call to the only soul that he knows in the area who could possibly bail him out, his estranged father, Frank Mars.
• ▶ 47:05 David Rosenthal But we're giving you a flavor of who Forrest is here.
• ▶ 47:09 Ben Gilbert If Forrest was in charge of coming up with the story of how this all went, this is the story he would have come up with, so.
• ▶ 47:17 David Rosenthal And as we'll see, Forrest is in charge of everything.
• ▶ 47:23 David Rosenthal Father and son are reunited after 13 years, during which, yeah, Ben, like you said, they've had no contact with each other, but Forrest has his phone number to call him.
• ▶ 47:32 David Rosenthal Frank bails out Forrest.
• ▶ 47:40 David Rosenthal And they go to a luncheonette to share a meal, at which young Forrest, who is selling cigarettes, orders a wholesome malted milkshake over this lunch reunion with his father.
• ▶ 47:53 David Rosenthal They get to talking, they're getting reacquainted, and Forrest learns that his dad is now this middlingly successful candy entrepreneur.
• ▶ 48:08 David Rosenthal Forrest says, well, hey, I got an idea for you.
• ▶ 49:06 David Rosenthal But here is the exact quote from Forrest as recorded in the family archives that Joelle got access to as part of her access to the company.
• ▶ 49:32 David Rosenthal A little forest.
• ▶ 50:25 David Rosenthal Now, first question you should be asking here is, wait, Forrest is in college now and ends up in jail in Chicago?
• ▶ 50:35 David Rosenthal Okay, so when Forrest is six years old, as we said, he gets sent off to live in Saskatchewan in Canada, in like a hardscrabble rural mining community with his grandparents.
• ▶ 50:48 David Rosenthal Unlike, I imagine, most of the folks around him, Forrest is a total outlier there.
• ▶ 51:06 Ben Gilbert Deborah Cadbury has a good line in her book, Noah's flood wouldn't have deterred Forrest Mars.
• ▶ 51:12 David Rosenthal So, when Forrest graduates, unlike
• ▶ 52:05 David Rosenthal So while he's at Berkeley in his first year there, to make money and support himself, he takes a job in the cafeteria, and supposedly he finagles a deal with the head cook that if Forrest can go source meat and other ingredients for the…
• ▶ 52:32 David Rosenthal And of course you might get a sense that Forrest is a good negotiator here.
• ▶ 53:23 David Rosenthal Anyway, this is all during Forrest's freshman year at Berkeley, and then the summer comes, and of course the cafeteria closes down, so he needs to get a job for the summer.
• ▶ 53:48 David Rosenthal Regardless of whether Forrest had anything to do with the Milky Way idea or launch or anything like that, meeting his dad, seeing that there is a business in the family, starts recalibrating Forrest's ambitions even higher than just being…
• ▶ 54:42 David Rosenthal Eye opening to forest.
• ▶ 54:52 Ben Gilbert I'm so glad you have these Forrest quotes.
• ▶ 54:55 David Rosenthal Like, supposedly in the Mars family archives, there's a video of Forrest, of like Forrest chatting with one of his longtime lieutenants from the company after he retired, but before he died, and it's like in the family archives, and Joel…
• ▶ 55:19 David Rosenthal He, with his father's help and presumably money for Forrest's junior year, he transfers to Yale and he's going to Yale with the goal of, I want to learn about business.
• ▶ 55:36 David Rosenthal Yeah, Forrest wanted to go to Yale because it was Yale, but really he wanted to go to Yale to meet all the other people.
• ▶ 55:56 David Rosenthal His nephew is Forrest's roommate at Yale.
• ▶ 56:27 David Rosenthal But back to Mars, Forrest worms his way through his roommate into getting to know Pierre and starts just pumping Pierre for lessons on how he runs his businesses.
• ▶ 1:11:30 Ben Gilbert So, Forrest is over in Europe, and the set of events of what he does in Europe to build this ridiculous, almost Trojan horse, like the set of skills he acquires, the assets he builds up, is crazy before he comes back to the US.
• ▶ 1:15:03 David Rosenthal Forrest and his young family now, by the way, with his young son, Forrest Jr., land first in Paris.
• ▶ 1:15:12 David Rosenthal And Forrest tries a couple little things, but eventually he decides that if he's really gonna build his own big company and stick it to his dad, he needs to learn the one critical thing that his dad didn't know.
• ▶ 1:15:50 David Rosenthal Forrest is just like, he's such a freaking G.
• ▶ 1:16:02 David Rosenthal So, in early 1933, Forrest moves his family from Paris to Switzerland to go learn from the chocolate masters, and Forrest goes to work, first at Jean Tobler, making Toblerone, and then at the original itself, Nestle.
• ▶ 1:16:27 David Rosenthal So yeah, when I say he goes to work there, it's not like he calls them up and is like, I'm Forrest Mars.
• ▶ 1:17:52 David Rosenthal And totally on brand for Forrest.
• ▶ 1:18:54 David Rosenthal But anyway, back to Forrest.
• ▶ 1:20:41 David Rosenthal So Forrest has now learned how to make chocolate, but of course with 50,000 dollars and a new startup factory, like, there's no way that he's going to make his own chocolate.
• ▶ 1:21:26 David Rosenthal So, as you said, Forrest goes and does a deal with Cadbury's to supply the chocolate for the Mars bar, just like Hershey had supplied the chocolate back in the US.
• ▶ 1:21:49 David Rosenthal But, it's just a matter of time in Forrest's mind until the operation eventually grows big enough that he can and will
• ▶ 1:22:24 David Rosenthal So, yes, Forrest not making his own chocolate just yet, but of course, his goal is that he will.
• ▶ 1:23:44 Ben Gilbert So there's this very, like, devout, duty-bound religiosity to the existing UK chocolate companies, and in comes brash Forrest, who's like, we're gonna do things the most efficient we possibly can, we're gonna make the most profit we…
• ▶ 1:24:21 David Rosenthal So Forrest.
• ▶ 1:24:28 David Rosenthal He will come back and he will retake over Mars Inc in America.
• ▶ 1:25:05 David Rosenthal So in 1934, just one year after he started the whole thing and started making Mars bars,
• ▶ 1:25:12 David Rosenthal He comes across this small British company called Chapel Brothers, which had started making, quote unquote, Chappies brand canned dog food.
• ▶ 1:25:55 Ben Gilbert I was like, why of all the things to buy, did he buy a pet food company?
• ▶ 1:26:19 Ben Gilbert But I'm so curious, how did Forrest get the idea, hey, I should go buy a dog food company when the market for dog food is new and unclear and...
• ▶ 1:26:30 David Rosenthal Yeah, well, I think, you know, look, he was visionary, and he got so many things, and I think he probably thought or
• ▶ 1:26:39 David Rosenthal Maybe the Chapel brothers thought and convinced Forrest that, you know, in the post-depression era, you know, the coming modern world, people's relationship with their pets would change, and that they would start feeding them dedicated pet…
• ▶ 1:27:20 Ben Gilbert I thought this was like a recent diversification hedge, but here it is effectively at the founding of Mars, or at least Forrest's modern Mars, and he's in the first, second year of business buying
• ▶ 1:27:55 David Rosenthal So, as this company is getting set up, I mean, would you expect any less of Forrest, I guess?
• ▶ 1:27:59 David Rosenthal You know, he's,
• ▶ 1:28:04 David Rosenthal He's building a whole new industry on the pet food side.
• ▶ 1:45:21 David Rosenthal So, back to the Forrest Mars story in progress.
• ▶ 1:45:45 David Rosenthal Now to hear Forrest tell it, the UK government decides that in order to help fund the war effort, they're going to impose a very heavy tax on all foreign residents living within the country, which of course would include Forrest and the…
• ▶ 1:46:39 David Rosenthal On the other hand, I suspect Forrest also had his ambitions always on coming back to America anyway, and now seemed like a pretty good time to do it.
• ▶ 1:47:25 David Rosenthal Which, if Cadbury's and Roundtree's was actually behind trying to run Forrest out of town, clearly they didn't know the loyalty of his employee base well enough.
• ▶ 1:47:35 David Rosenthal Yeah, totally wild in 1939 that Forrest could do that.
• ▶ 1:47:49 David Rosenthal Remember, Frank had died a few years before, and at this point, Chicago Mars is being run by Forrest's widowed stepmother, the other Ethel, and her half-brother, who is the president and CEO of the business, and they
• ▶ 1:48:07 David Rosenthal Of course, detest Forrest, and they won't let him anywhere near the company.
• ▶ 1:48:14 David Rosenthal So Forrest has some shares after his dad has died, but he's by far a minority shareholder.
• ▶ 1:48:21 David Rosenthal The biggest shareholder, I believe, is the other Ethel, the second wife, and then Forrest's half-sister Patricia, her daughter, also holds a large stake.
• ▶ 1:48:34 David Rosenthal So Forrest, I don't know, I'm guessing he probably owns maybe 10, maybe 20% of the business.
• ▶ 1:48:43 David Rosenthal So, Forrest does what Forrest does.
• ▶ 1:49:30 David Rosenthal Before Forrest leaves Europe, he had spied a new, to him at least, type of chocolate candy that had become popular with soldiers in the Spanish Civil War called Draguet.
• ▶ 1:50:23 David Rosenthal And so Forrest, as he's heading back to the U.S., thinks, you know, I think there might be some global appeal here in this Drage product.
• ▶ 2:23:26 David Rosenthal Like I said, at this point, Forrest's empire is doing, call it, 200 million-ish of revenue annually around the world, and Chicago Mars had about fifty million of revenue, so Forrest is, call it, four times the size of Chicago Mars.
• ▶ 2:23:57 David Rosenthal And I think maybe Forrest and Patricia got, like, some small stakes at that point in time.
• ▶ 2:24:09 David Rosenthal Ethel dies in 1945, and when that happens, her stock gets split fifty-fifty between Patricia and Forrest, per Frank's original will.
• ▶ 2:24:20 David Rosenthal Ethel had two-thirds, one-third goes to Patricia, one-third goes to Forrest.
• ▶ 2:24:25 David Rosenthal As we get on into the 19 fifties, and Forrest has now turned M&Ms into a big success, he starts turning his attention to Chicago Mars.
• ▶ 2:25:02 David Rosenthal Clearly, they did not know Forrest very well because he shows up.
• ▶ 2:25:20 David Rosenthal All the big mistakes that William is making as CEO and why William should be fired and Forrest should take over.
• ▶ 2:25:45 David Rosenthal Still though, William and Patricia and the rest of the management isn't going to get on board with selling to Forrest or letting him take over.
• ▶ 2:26:00 David Rosenthal Forrest figures like, okay, great, this is my chance, he starts lobbying Patricia, he's lobbying everyone else who owns the company, all the management, saying like, great, sell to me, let me take over, let me run this business.
• ▶ 2:27:04 David Rosenthal Now, it's also a very convenient disaster for Forrest, who wants to pressure everybody else into selling and being able to take things over.
• ▶ 2:27:18 David Rosenthal Forest flies to San Diego, where Patricia lives.
• ▶ 2:27:34 David Rosenthal Anyway, Forrest finally convinces Patricia to sell.
• ▶ 2:27:54 David Rosenthal Forrest is like, okay.
• ▶ 2:28:36 David Rosenthal Forrest now owns two-thirds of the business.