The two M’s in M&M’s were never meant to be an abstract trademark. The name came directly from the surnames of two men: Forrest Mars and Bruce Murrie. And the second man happened to be the son of the president of Hershey, the Mars family’s biggest competitor. By the early 1940s, Forrest Mars needed Murrie not as a friend or a visionary partner, but as a key to the one thing no confectioner could obtain without government approval: chocolate.
The idea for the product itself had come from abroad. In the late 1930s, Forrest was traveling through Europe, working in the international confectionery business after a bitter falling out with his father, Frank Mars, had forced him to build his own operation in Britain. During the Spanish Civil War, he watched soldiers eating small pieces of chocolate covered in a hard sugar shell, candies made by the British company Rowntree’s, which produced Smarties. The shell kept the chocolate from melting in hot weather and inside uniform pockets.
Forrest recognized it not just as a curiosity, but as a ready-made solution for his own market. Back in the United States, he filed a patent for his own process of applying a hard sugar shell and received it on March 3, 1941. Production began in a factory in Newark, New Jersey. But as war spread across Europe and raw materials grew scarce, Forrest faced a critical problem.
Chocolate supplies were coming under direct government control, and Hershey, the country’s largest chocolate manufacturer, had priority access. No other company could secure enough cocoa without official approval. So Forrest turned to his competitor. Bruce Murrie was the son of William Murrie, president of Hershey, and a young man looking for an independent project outside his father’s shadow.
The deal was straightforward: Forrest gave Murrie a 20 percent stake in the new product in exchange for a reliable supply of Hershey chocolate. The company’s name was built from the partners’ surnames, Mars and Murrie, hence M&M’s. The first batches were packaged in simple cardboard tubes, not the plastic bags familiar today. The irony was not lost on anyone who knew the family history.
Forrest was repeating the arrangement he himself had experienced with his own father, only now he was the one holding the leverage. He was not trying to win Murrie over with charm. He offered him exactly what he wanted: a co-ownership stake and a name on the package. For the first few years, M&M’s were not sold to ordinary consumers at all.
The product launched almost simultaneously with the United States entering World War II, and its main customer became the US military. The hard sugar shell made the candies perfectly suited to soldiers’ rations. They could withstand the heat of the Pacific theater and survive the rough handling of military transport, where ordinary chocolate would melt into a mess inside a uniform pocket or duffel bag. Advertising from the period played openly on this status.
The slogan “Now 100% at War” emphasized that the company’s entire production was going to the war effort rather than store shelves, a rare case of a company advertising its product’s unavailability as a patriotic contribution. When soldiers returned home after the war, many were already loyal to a brand they had discovered in their field rations, not in a supermarket. That wartime audience laid the foundation for M&M’s civilian success in the postwar years, when the candies finally entered the open retail market. Once the war ended and government rationing of chocolate was lifted, the need for the Hershey partnership disappeared.
In 1949, Forrest Mars bought out Bruce Murrie’s 20 percent stake and became sole owner of the brand. Formally, the partner’s name remained embedded in the product, the second M did not disappear. But the man behind it virtually vanished from the company’s public history. Today, most people buying a bag of M&M’s have no idea that the second M once belonged to a real person.
Even the company’s own official accounts tend to mention Murrie only briefly, preferring to focus on Forrest’s observation of sugar-coated chocolate during the Spanish Civil War. There was a pattern in this that seemed characteristic of the Mars family. A partnership lasted exactly as long as it remained economically necessary, and once the need for the partner disappeared, he was quietly bought out and rarely mentioned again. Something similar had happened decades earlier when Frank Mars pushed his son out of the business once Forrest’s ambitions no longer fit his father’s plans.
Then came perhaps the most absurd chapter in the brand’s history. In 1976, Mars completely removed the color red from the M&M’s lineup. The reason had nothing to do with the product. In the early 1970s, Soviet researchers reported that a dye called Red Dye No.
2 could cause tumors in laboratory rats. The US FDA officially banned the dye in January 1976, and a wave of public anxiety about anything red in food swept the country. There was just one problem: M&M’s had never used that particular dye. The red in the candies came from Red Dye No.
3 and Red Dye No. 40, neither of which had been involved in the studies that triggered the panic. The research itself was later criticized for its methodology and small sample of animals. But Mars apparently decided that proving this to the public would be more difficult and expensive than simply removing red from the lineup, avoiding even the slightest association with the banned substance.
The FDA commissioner at the time later acknowledged publicly that there was no actual evidence the dye posed a health risk to humans, but by then the decision had already been made. For the next 11 years, a bag of M&M’s contained brown, yellow, orange, green, and tan candies, but not a single red one, even though there was never any real scientific reason for the red candy to disappear. In 1982, a University of Tennessee student named Paul Hethman jokingly began writing letters to the company demanding that the red M&M be brought back. The idea was deliberately absurd, probably never intended to be more than a joke to share with friends at a college bar.
But the idea unexpectedly caught on. Informal “Red M&M Protection Societies” began appearing spontaneously on college campuses across the country. The absurdity was infectious. A harmless candy color had disappeared because of a health scare involving a completely different dye, making the story perfect fodder for student satire aimed at overly cautious bureaucracy.
Mars began receiving thousands of letters demanding the return of a candy that regulators had never actually banned. In 1985, still cautious, Mars brought red candies back in limited edition Christmas packages, essentially a market test. The public response was overwhelmingly positive, and in February 1987, red officially returned to the permanent lineup. The company also remembered the instigator of the campaign.
By then, Hethman had long since graduated, but Mars sent him 50 pounds of M&M’s, all of them red, as a thank you for the joke campaign that, 11 years after the color had disappeared, had unexpectedly helped bring it back. In 1995, Mars turned a routine product decision into a nationwide spectacle. Instead of simply deciding internally to replace the dull tan color with something brighter, the company launched a public vote. Consumers were asked to choose the next new M&M’s color from blue, pink, or purple.
Anyone could participate by mail, by phone, or through coupons printed on packages. More than 10 million people cast their votes. Blue won with 54 percent, permanently replacing tan in the standard lineup. The campaign transformed a manufacturing decision the company would have made on its own anyway into an opportunity for millions of people to feel personally involved in the brand.
The power was not in the vote itself, but in how deliberately unimportant and playful the decision was. Nobody seriously believed the future of the world depended on whether M&M’s became blue, pink, or purple, and that was exactly why participating was fun. Mars ran a similar campaign in Japan at roughly the same time, where consumers unexpectedly chose pink. Blue became the global winner, but the regional difference revealed how much seemingly universal preferences can vary.
In 2022, the company updated the appearance of its animated brand mascots. The changes were minor: green traded her high-heeled boots for sneakers, brown’s heels became lower, and orange was given a storyline centered around anxiety and self-consciousness. The controversy from parts of conservative American media was considerably more intense than the changes themselves. Tucker Carlson, then a host on Fox News, repeatedly returned to the subject, describing the redesigned characters as less sexy and accusing Mars of politicizing its cartoon mascots.
The controversy escalated further in early 2023 when the company launched a limited edition package called “Flip the Status Quo,” featuring only the brand’s female characters, with proceeds going toward supporting women in the creative industries. Carlson devoted another segment to the campaign, commenting on the appearance and presumed sexuality of the animated characters, triggering another wave of mockery over the fact that an adult television host was devoting such serious attention to cartoon candies. In January 2023, the company announced an indefinite pause in the use of its animated characters, replacing them with a real-life spokesperson, actress and comedian Maya Rudolph, who debuted in a commercial during the Super Bowl. In its official statement, the company dryly remarked that it had never expected a candy’s shoes to become such a polarizing subject.
Within a few months, however, the partially returned candies also returned alongside Rudolph. Mars decided to use both, effectively acknowledging that completely abandoning its recognizable characters carried its own commercial risks. If there is one pattern in the entire story, it is this: almost every major decision about M&M’s was driven not by internal creative boldness, but by some form of external pressure, real or imagined. The hard sugar shell came from observing soldiers in a foreign war.
The partnership with Murrie was driven by wartime shortages rather than friendship. Red was removed not because of genuine danger, but because the company feared public panic, and it returned because of a tongue-in-cheek student campaign that grew into a nationwide movement. Even the mascot change was ultimately a retreat in response to media controversy. The brand that sells itself through carefree fun spent decades moving forward not because of its own initiative, but in spite of outside pressure.
And every time the company backed down, it managed to turn that retreat into another wave of customer loyalty. The one exception is the fate of Bruce Murrie. The man whose name is literally preserved in the product’s name, yet whose actual role in its creation was gradually erased so thoroughly that the company’s talent for adapting to circumstances never extended to its willingness to remember him publicly.