The best-selling chocolate bar in the world carries the name of a horse that died before the product ever existed, a quiet tribute that hides a far rougher origin. The company behind it was built on a family rupture so complete that a father handed his own son $50,000, told him there was not enough room in the business for both of them, and ordered him to leave the country and start over. The son crossed the Atlantic, built a competing chocolate empire, and decades later bought out his father’s company, closing the circle exactly where it had begun. The story starts in 1911, when Frank Mars founded the Mar-O-Bar Company in Minnesota after several failed attempts in the confectionery trade.
His real breakthrough arrived in 1923 with the Milky Way bar, which brought serious money and allowed production to move to Chicago. Riding that success, Frank and his second wife, Ethel, bought nearly 3,000 acres in Tennessee and established a farm they jokingly called Milky Way Farm, after the candy bar that had made them wealthy. There they raised pedigreed Hereford cattle and thoroughbred racehorses. One of those horses, a favorite of the entire family, was named Snickers.
Meanwhile, the company was developing a new product: peanut-based nougat, caramel, and roasted peanuts covered in milk chocolate, a recipe inspired by an existing street confection that they decided to put inside a chocolate coating. The product did not even have a name yet. The team was still debating the formula and packaging when the horse named Snickers suddenly died. The family chose to preserve the memory of the animal by giving its name to the new bar, a touching but essentially accidental decision that would define the brand for nearly a century.
The bar hit the market in 1930 and immediately stood out for a scandalous reason: it cost 20 cents while the standard price for a chocolate bar was only 5 cents. Production was still almost entirely manual. Workers poured the peanut nougat into molds, layered the caramel and peanuts, cut each bar by hand, and dipped them one by one into melted chocolate. Despite costing four times the market price, the bar caught on and eventually became the best-selling candy bar in history, surpassing even the Milky Way.
The recipe has barely changed since then. The same four layers of nougat, caramel, roasted peanuts, and milk chocolate have remained virtually untouched for nearly a century. Today, producing the enormous daily volume requires around 100 tons of peanuts, with each bar containing an average of roughly 16 peanuts. The genuinely dramatic part of the story never appears in the company’s official press releases.
Frank’s son, Forrest Mars, joined the family business in 1929 after graduating from Yale University with a degree in industrial engineering. He proved to be a talented engineer, helping his father optimize production processes and eliminate inefficiencies left over from the company’s early, almost artisanal beginnings. But Forrest had much more ambitious plans. He wanted to expand beyond the United States, starting with Canada, and demanded a third of the company in exchange for leading the expansion.
Frank refused. The conversation escalated into an open conflict that ended with the father giving his son a choice: stay under the existing conditions, or leave altogether. Forrest chose to leave. Frank eventually handed him $50,000 and the rights to manufacture Milky Way overseas, effectively pushing him out of the family business.
The stakes were real. The 1930s were just beginning, and the Great Depression had already engulfed the country. Leaving meant a genuine risk of ending up with nothing. $50,000 was a substantial sum for the time, but it was hardly a guarantee of success on another continent where Forrest had neither connections, nor production facilities, nor a recognizable name.
Forrest did not simply survive being pushed out. He built a parallel empire that would eventually become even larger than his father’s. After moving to the English town of Slough, he founded his own company and in 1932 introduced the Mars bar, essentially a reworked version of his father’s Milky Way adapted to British tastes: sweeter nougat, different caramel proportions, and packaging designed for European consumers. In 1936, Maltesers followed.
Forrest also moved into pet food, founding Pedigree Petfoods, a division that decades later would become one of the corporation’s major revenue sources, at one point even surpassing chocolate sales. Forrest worked with the same obsession as his father, multiplied by a frugality bordering on the extreme. He was so miserly with personal expenses that his father-in-law once deliberately sailed to England to bring Forrest’s wife, Audrey, and their young children back to the United States, unable to tolerate the conditions in which he believed his daughter’s family was living. Publicity was never one of Forrest’s strengths.
From the very beginning, he preferred to conduct business quietly and away from the spotlight. In 1941, after returning to the United States at the outbreak of World War II, Forrest partnered with another businessman to create M&M’s, while in a separate joint venture with a Texas entrepreneur, he helped create the Uncle Ben’s rice brand. One revealing detail about his character: when the U. S.
military asked him during the war to share patents for quick-cooking rice technology with other manufacturers so production could be expanded for the armed forces, Forrest refused. The war ended before anyone could force him to reveal the manufacturing secrets. For him, business remained business, even in the middle of a global conflict. Frank Mars died of a heart attack in 1934, and the Chicago business passed on through inheritance, but not to the exiled Forrest.
Instead, it went to other relatives and minority shareholders, including Forrest’s half-sister. For the next 30 years, the two Mars companies, American and European, operated in parallel, formally belonging to the same family but managed completely separately, with different recipes, different packaging, and even different names for similar products. The bar known in Britain as Mars is called Milky Way in America, while what Britain calls Milky Way tastes much closer to the American 3 Musketeers, a product that essentially does not exist outside the United States. The split within a single family became literally embedded in the different names given to similar candy bars on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
It was not until 1964 that Forrest finally bought out the remaining shareholders of the American business, including his half-sister Patricia, and merged his British Food Manufacturers Inc. with his father’s Chicago company into a single organization called Mars Incorporated, with roughly 80% of the company still remaining in family hands. After taking control, he immediately began implementing the principles of rigorous scientific management he had developed through his engineering education: strict quality control, a flat organizational structure, and the famous practice of having even senior executives work at ordinary desks in a shared open-plan space, highly unusual for corporate America in the mid-20th century. Thirty years after his father had personally thrown him out of the business, Forrest did not simply return.
He became the man who reunited both halves of the family legacy under one roof and took over the resulting company as president and chief executive. Forrest’s management style shaped the company’s culture for decades, and that culture was built around an almost pathological level of privacy. In 1966, Forrest gave the only interview of his entire life to the trade publication Candy Industry. After feeling that he had been misquoted, he vowed never to speak publicly to the press again and kept that promise until his death in 1999.
He raised his three children, Forrest Jr. , John, and Jacqueline, by the same rules: avoid journalists, distrust outsiders, and never discuss the family’s wealth publicly. Jacqueline reportedly walked out of a lunch after discovering that she had been seated next to the publisher of Forbes simply because the magazine had included the family on its list of the world’s wealthiest people. Today, Mars Incorporated remains one of the largest privately held companies in the United States, with annual revenue in the tens of billions of dollars.
Yet almost nobody outside the industry could identify a current member of the Mars family by sight. Even later generations, including Victoria Mars, Forrest Sr. ’s granddaughter, who became chair of the board in 2014, have generally stayed away from the public spotlight. Paradoxically, that very secrecy fueled journalists’ fascination for the family for decades more than openness ever could have.
The less information the Mars family provided, the more reporters tried to figure out what was hidden behind the silence. There is also a much more harmless chapter in the brand’s history directly connected to the legacy of that split. From 1968 to 1990, the bar known to the rest of the world as Snickers was sold in the United Kingdom and Ireland under a completely different name, Marathon. The reason went back to the separate histories of the two companies.
In 1990, as part of a global effort to standardize the brands after the businesses had been reunited, Mars renamed Marathon Snickers throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland. Consumer reaction was far less enthusiastic than expected. The bar, which had been the best-selling chocolate bar in Britain before the renaming, fell to third place after the change. Some customers deliberately boycotted the product simply because the name had changed.
Even today, more than 30 years after the rebranding, older British consumers will occasionally walk into a shop and ask for a Marathon out of habit. By 2009, the brand faced a much more serious problem than its name. Sales in the United States were declining, while its marketing messages varied dramatically from country to country. Snickers risked losing its position as the world’s best-selling chocolate bar precisely when competitors were beginning to close the gap.
The solution came from the advertising agency BBDO, a universal truth that could work in virtually any culture without translation: when people are hungry, they become completely different versions of themselves, usually irritated or irrational, and a Snickers brings them back to normal. The campaign’s debut came during the 2010 Super Bowl. In the first commercial, 88-year-old actress Betty White plays backyard football, clumsily falls into the mud, and snaps at her teammates until one player’s girlfriend hands her a Snickers. After taking a bite, White literally transforms back into a young man named Mike.
The commercial became a genuine sensation. It topped USA Today’s annual ranking of the best Super Bowl commercials, put Betty White back at the center of popular culture for weeks, and was even referenced in an episode of The Office. During the first year after the campaign launched, global brand sales increased by nearly 16%, and over two years, the campaign generated an additional $376 million in revenue. The increase was so widespread that marketing teams in 56 of the brand’s 58 markets reported gains in market share.
The slogan, “You’re not you when you’re hungry,” has since been used across most of those markets, repeatedly refreshed with new celebrities while always preserving the same simple premise. The company eventually pushed the idea beyond traditional advertising with Hungerithm, an algorithm that monitored the level of irritation in American social media posts in real time and automatically lowered the price of a Snickers bar in participating stores when online aggression reached particularly high levels. The beloved horse of a family died shortly before its name became permanently attached to the best-selling chocolate bar in history. The company built around that touching tribute spent the next 90 years surviving splits and reunifications.
A father forced his son out with $50,000. The son built a parallel empire on the other side of the Atlantic. And 30 years later, that same son returned and reunited both halves under one roof. The family that emerged from that conflict chose absolute privacy for itself: a lifetime of silence, a refusal to speak to the press, even a dramatic walkout from a lunch because a Forbes journalist was sitting nearby.
And yet they built a brand whose most successful advertising campaign rests on almost the opposite idea, that every one of us occasionally becomes someone else, less pleasant and less recognizable, and that one simple human act can bring us back to ourselves. A company built on a father-and-son rupture now sells the idea of reconnecting with your normal self through a chocolate bar rather than the difficult conversation the Mars family itself carefully avoided for three generations.