Mars, Incorporated
also referred to as: mars · mars incorporated
includes Mars UK, Mars Snacking
44 statements across 1 episodes · 16 bullish · 0 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Dec 16, 2024 by Ben Gilbert · said 116 times in 6 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by David Rosenthal (69), Ben Gilbert (47)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2024 108 mentions in 1 episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Mars, Incorporated, oldest first
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Dec 16, 2024
Mars first manufactured count-line candy mechanically at factory scale
“And effectively what they were doing was they were the first ones who said, wait a minute, if we're gonna make a count line, we should do it in a mechanical way. And so, even though all these other people are selling these one-offs locally to different stores …”
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Mars's 1930s pet food business generated cash to fund candy expansion
“The fact that this happened in 1935 completely blew my mind, because I knew that Mars was in the pet food business, much like Nestle Purina is in the pet food business. I thought this was like a recent diversification hedge, but here it is effectively at the f…”
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Mars historically targeted an 18% return on total assets across divisions
“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 than five years.”
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Deep operational knowledge enables superior underwriting compared to blunt valuation multiples
“Multiples are kind of a blunt instrument used for valuation when you don't actually deeply know and understand the business, and when you do, you can just underwrite better than everyone else, and you have more margin of safety in the price that you are willin…”
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Mars routinely kept manufacturing improvements as unpatented trade secrets
“There's actually great stories about Forrest, perhaps both himself, but also through 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…”
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Dec 16, 2024
Mars leads the highly fragmented international candy market with 11% share
“Internationally, it's kind of a different story. It is a very fragmented industry. Mars is the whale with 11%, but the next highest are seven percent and five percent, and only a third of the market is made up by the top five companies. Mars, Mondelez, Ferrero…”
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
The 3 Musketeers originally contained chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry flavor bars
“It was actually sold as a package containing three separate bars, each with a different flavor, chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, and due to restrictions during World War II, they had to cut production to just the chocolate version.”
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Complete ownership enables suboptimizing short-term results for long-term horizons
“Complete ownership, or at least board control in Meta's case, is freedom. You can do things like invest for 10 years from now when it's gonna be a super lumpy period between now and 10 years from now. If you believe in the long-term vision, you can suboptimize…”
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Forrest Mars believed building wealth requires knowing how to manufacture a product
“You can hire lawyers. You can hire accountants. You can hire advertising men or financial types. But if you want to get rich, you got to know how to make a product. And you aren't going to hire anybody to make a product for you to make you rich. They'll only m…”
Dec 16, 2024
Mars passed on E.T. product placement over a $1M co-marketing requirement
“And M&M's passed on the opportunity, because it had to come with a guaranteed million dollars of co-marketing, consumer promotion, trade promotions, displays, featuring E.T. Mars was not down to do that with the M&M's characters, and passed on the opportunity.”
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Mars paid $20,000 to suppress newspaper photos of the founders' sons
“Mars didn't like the Washington Post article, like, didn't like the way it came out, so not only did they then fire their PR consultant, they went and found the newspaper's freelance photographer and paid off 20,000 dollars for the rights to the photos to be s…”
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Mars UK workers could halt entire production lines for quality defects
“Any employee in the factory could stop the line for any reason at any time.
If there's anything that's out of place, anything that could impact quality, you know, anything is dirty, anything is not perfect, every single worker in the entire facility can stop t…”
Dec 16, 2024
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Brand power accrues via lifetime margin dollars rather than high margin percentages
“Essentially, if you trust the brand more, and the prices are the same, you just buy more of it over time. So you give more absolute margin dollars to that company over time, especially in a reoccurring purchase business like this. That's the way that brand pow…”
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Forrest Mars Sr. belongs alongside Henry Ford among top American entrepreneurs
“And because the company is so private, like, nobody knows about him, you know, like, but he should be right up there With Sam Walton, Henry Ford, with the very, very greatest American entrepreneurs of all time. He was truly a genius.”