Mars, Incorporated, every mention

116 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Mars, Incorporated

mentionsepisodesper episode tap a year for its mentions

every year anyone David Rosenthal 69 Ben Gilbert 47

Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Mars, Incorporated comes up

loading…

The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio) · Acquired Jun 23, 2026 · 1 mention

▶ 2:16:09 David Rosenthal Great for their business like Coca-Cola or Mars or Lockheed.

10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired Dec 15, 2025 · 2 mentions

▶ 2:25:24 David Rosenthal Uh, my two are, um, first one is a reach back to December of last year with the Mars episode, um, Emperors of Chocolate by Joel Glenn Brenner.
▶ 2:25:42 David Rosenthal So it's the dual history of Hershey and Mars together.

Coca-Cola: The Complete History & Strategy (Audio) · Acquired Nov 24, 2025 · 1 mention

▶ 1:22:52 Ben Gilbert As discussed on our Mars episode.

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired Oct 6, 2025 · 3 mentions

▶ 1:12:05 Ben Gilbert Musk told Hassabis his priority was getting to Mars as a backup planet in case something went wrong here.
▶ 1:12:19 Ben Gilbert Then being on Mars wouldn't help you, because if we got there, then it would obviously be easy for an AI to get there through our communication systems or whatever it was.
▶ 1:12:42 Ben Gilbert I think it's crazy that Demis is sort of the one that woke Elon up to this idea of, we might not be safe from the AI on Mars either.

Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired Dec 16, 2024 · 93 mentions

▶ 4:54 Ben Gilbert David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, although not Mars, obviously, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.
▶ 5:31 David Rosenthal Mars, as we'll talk about, is an incredibly private company and private family.
▶ 5:37 David Rosenthal She's the only journalist that ever got real access to the company.
▶ 5:51 David Rosenthal She was a young reporter at the Post and, uh, called the company like every day for a year and finally got access and that became a piece in the Washington Post magazine and then she turned it into the book Emperors of Chocolate.
▶ 9:21 David Rosenthal This is the company, you know, Mars, Snickers, M&M's, Milky Way, it's all to come here.
▶ 9:26 Ben Gilbert Out of this one company named Mars.
▶ 13:14 David Rosenthal Would go on to become the globally famous, fifty billion dollar annual revenue, private family business, Mars Incorporated.
▶ 41:55 David Rosenthal The first candy bar, Countline bar, from the Mars Company.
▶ 46:43 Ben Gilbert This is the legend, and this is the Mars Company's version of the story.
▶ 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.
▶ 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…
▶ 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.
▶ 58:19 David Rosenthal Spoiler alert, Mars now owns Wrigley.
▶ 59:37 David Rosenthal He contracts the Austin Company, which had built and designed all the Ford automobile plants and assembly lines to build the lines in the Mars factory.
▶ 1:00:45 David Rosenthal So very quickly, Mars becomes Hershey's biggest customer.
▶ 1:01:23 David Rosenthal So once this gets going and money really starts flowing into the company, Frank wants to spend it.
▶ 1:22:47 David Rosenthal So, by 1939, five years-ish after they get production up and running, Mars UK has become the third largest candy company in Britain behind Cadbury and Roundtree's.
▶ 1:22:59 David Rosenthal So, like, they go from nobody to third largest player, big industrial scale, pretty quick.
▶ 1:28:23 David Rosenthal So if you talk to anybody who works or worked at Mars, they will quote the principles at you religiously.
▶ 1:28:52 David Rosenthal I think that's when they sort of adapted that document into the Mars principles.
▶ 1:29:54 David Rosenthal But even here in the thirties in the UK, he basically implements the Toyota production system in the Mars factory.
▶ 1:32:09 David Rosenthal So for years and years, the standard within Mars was that you should make three to four times the normal salary for your job.
▶ 1:33:35 Ben Gilbert I'm pretty sure this is still true, that the CEO of Mars today has a time card, and they punch in and out every day.
▶ 1:34:09 David Rosenthal There are no offices period to this day at Mars.
▶ 1:34:21 David Rosenthal No, Mars was the first open office starting in the 19 thirties.
▶ 1:34:32 David Rosenthal Again, even still to this day, there are just a small number of conference rooms in any given Mars office.
▶ 1:36:19 David Rosenthal And as long as his partners are making money and making more money selling Mars products or supplying Mars than they are any of Mars' competitors, that's going to be a compounding advantage.
▶ 1:38:12 David Rosenthal And again, if you talk to anybody in Mars today, ROTA, ROTA, ROTA, ROTA, everything is about ROTA.
▶ 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…
▶ 1:41:44 Ben Gilbert He pointed out that despite operating with 30% fewer employees than its closest competitor, so today this is Mars versus Hershey,
▶ 1:41:53 Ben Gilbert Mars generated more output per worker than any other in the industry.
▶ 1:41:57 Ben Gilbert So in 1990, for example, Mars' revenue averaged 429,000 for employee compared to 228,000 at Hershey.
▶ 1:44:28 Ben Gilbert It was, but then 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…
▶ 1:45:09 Ben Gilbert And for Mars, that means private ownership.
▶ 1:55:33 David Rosenthal Just tell him Mars is here.
▶ 1:55:37 Ben Gilbert Because at this point, while Hershey was still a supplier to Chicago Mars, they were really starting to be a competitor.
▶ 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.
▶ 1:55:57 David Rosenthal Obviously, the implication being Chicago Mars is
▶ 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.
▶ 1:58:00 David Rosenthal He knows that if he's gonna build a new candy company, come back to the U.S., take on and defeat his father's old company in Mars, he's gonna need resources.
▶ 2:02:17 David Rosenthal Like, Chicago Mars.
▶ 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.
▶ 2:24:25 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.
▶ 2:26:23 David Rosenthal Whether he was a good employee or not, he is a totally, totally terrible CEO of Mars Chicago.
▶ 2:28:00 David Rosenthal And condition number two, you need to promise me that you will make this company, our father's company, Mars Incorporated, the new parent company of all of your businesses, and preserve our father's legacy.
▶ 2:28:46 David Rosenthal And by mid-nineteen 64, he has full control of Mars Incorporated.
▶ 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.
▶ 2:31:44 David Rosenthal His first act of business, once he becomes CEO of Mars America, is he calls Hershey up, and he's like, hello, remember me?
▶ 2:31:54 David Rosenthal I'm the new CEO of Mars.
▶ 2:32:23 David Rosenthal So, the Hershey's team estimates that it'll be at least 10 years before Mars turns profitable on this decision to make their own chocolate.
▶ 2:33:13 David Rosenthal One is the quality principle, which, you know, I really do think the quality principle is number one in Mars for a reason, and
▶ 2:34:38 Ben Gilbert So I found that it was 70%, and the place that I found it was from, this is flashing forward a little bit, some 1979 consumer market research that Mars commissioned
▶ 2:35:02 David Rosenthal So it may indeed be 90% now, in part because of those efforts by Mars.
▶ 2:35:20 David Rosenthal It wasn't until this Mars initiative in 1979?
▶ 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?
▶ 2:44:03 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.
▶ 2:45:04 David Rosenthal And as a result, in 1973, the combined Mars, which is all of the legacy Mars Inc. products, Snickers, Milky Way, Three Musketeers, et cetera, plus M&M's, passes all of Hershey to become the number one candy company in America.
▶ 2:45:23 Ben Gilbert I don't think they ever looked back.
▶ 2:45:25 David Rosenthal Well, Hershey did eventually retake the lead in America from Mars much later, but Mars is by far the largest candy company globally.
▶ 2:45:39 Ben Gilbert And I think Mars' American candy business is about the size of Hershey's American candy business today.
▶ 2:45:45 Ben Gilbert I think they're kind of neck and neck, but Mars has everything else too.
▶ 2:45:49 Ben Gilbert This game that you're talking about, David, of the cat and mouse price war game would continue, and Mars would basically have the advantage every time, because Hershey's primary thing they're marketing is the chocolate bar, which is made…
▶ 2:46:17 Ben Gilbert I mean, it has nougat and peanuts, and so what they basically do, there's another time, I think this happens in the early eighties, where Mars knows that the commodity prices are on the uptick for cocoa, and so it's gonna squeeze…
▶ 2:46:36 Ben Gilbert They announce bigger bars at cheaper prices.
▶ 2:46:42 Ben Gilbert And so this is a sustainable, competitive advantage that Mars has selling something that has just lower cost of goods for a equal perception of value to customers.
▶ 2:46:55 David Rosenthal The other thing that Mars builds up through the, maybe even starting in the sixties, but definitely in the seventies and eighties is a very, very sophisticated commodities trading department that Hershey doesn't have.
▶ 2:47:09 Ben Gilbert Of course they do.
▶ 2:47:11 David Rosenthal Of course, uh, you know, it's this very Mars style to do this.
▶ 2:47:20 David Rosenthal Rumors are, these are rumors, but heard from multiple places, Mars has actually made
▶ 2:47:45 David Rosenthal Mars is actually profiting hugely from market swings in commodity prices.
▶ 2:57:05 David Rosenthal In 2008, Mars buys Wrigley with the help of Uncle Warren and Uncle Charlie.
▶ 2:57:20 David Rosenthal One of them's like, I've been conducting a 70 year taste test on both Mars and Wrigley, and, uh, they both passed the test.
▶ 2:57:35 David Rosenthal He actually has a really insightful quote in the 2011 Berkshire shareholder letter while they were still a shareholder in Wrigley as a Mars subsidiary.
▶ 2:57:58 David Rosenthal I mean, he doesn't say this, but, like, obviously, this is the Mars Formula Two.
▶ 2:59:04 David Rosenthal Mars buys the Wrigley company for twenty three billion dollars.
▶ 2:59:14 David Rosenthal And even Mars at this point in time doesn't have twenty-three billion of cash on hand.
▶ 2:59:21 Ben Gilbert I'm always trying to guess how much, through all these points in history, I think Mars piles up a lot of cash, but I think they're really conservative in how they decide to deploy it.
▶ 2:59:41 David Rosenthal But yeah, so Mars pays eleven billion dollars itself, they get 5.7 billion dollars in bank debt from Goldman Sachs, and then Berkshire comes in with the rest of the financing, about six and a half billion dollars total.
▶ 3:00:06 Ben Gilbert Wrigley will use the profits from all their businesses to buy out Berkshire, and so it must have been negotiated in that Mars had the right over some period of time to buy out that 2.1 billion dollar equity investment.
▶ 3:00:20 David Rosenthal So what happens five years later in 2013, Mars repurchases the debt portion of Berkshire's financing, and man, this debt, God, the financial crisis, like Warren was so good to be investing in such high quality companies at the interest…
▶ 3:00:58 David Rosenthal Now, when Mars bought it back in 2013, that was before the debt matured, so they had to pay Warren a premium to buy it back early.
▶ 3:01:27 David Rosenthal The equity portion, the 2.1 billion, in 2016, Mars buys out Berkshire, so Buffett sells Mars his entire stake back for 4.6 billion dollars versus the 2.1 that he originally invested.
▶ 3:02:41 David Rosenthal I bet it helped pull in the bank debt, because I doubt Mars had significant banking relationships going into this, because they didn't have any debt.
▶ 3:04:32 David Rosenthal Wrigley, I went back and looked at their old 10 K's before Mars acquired them.
▶ 3:13:28 Ben Gilbert In twenty-twenty-one, they did forty-five billion in revenue.
▶ 3:13:34 Ben Gilbert And to your point, they're now saying over 50.
▶ 3:13:44 Ben Gilbert Mars snacking
▶ 3:13:48 Ben Gilbert That is a segment of their business that includes all the candy.
▶ 3:14:07 Ben Gilbert 59% of revenue comes from the pet care segment, and of their 140,000 employees, almost a 100,000 work in pet care.
▶ 3:14:27 Ben Gilbert Specifically about Mars, we can probably look at industry comparables to try to understand that, but at least on a top-line basis and an employee basis, pet care is the dominant component of this business.
▶ 3:14:38 Ben Gilbert If you want a little bit of a hint, the new CEO in twenty-twenty-two came from their pet care division.
▶ 3:14:45 Ben Gilbert In many ways, they are a pet food company that also makes candy, and always has been.
▶ 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.