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MEMORIES:
PHOTOS:
The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand.
It’s everyday knowledge that many of our common comforts and awesome accessories actually originated in military circles. Developed for troop and adapted for citizens, we have come to accept everything from dehydrated food products to Hummers as facts of civilian life. Add M&M’s to that list.
The godfather of candy, Forrest Mars Sr., was party to just such a marvel of convenience and common sense during the Spanish Civil War (1836-39). To prevent chocolate from sticking to their fingers, the army supplied soldiers with a sort of chocolate pill that was coated in a hard sugar shell. Mars was so impressed that he took the idea for a non-melting chocolate pellet back to America with him and made one of his own. The English market already had a version appropriately called “Smarties,” so Mars, along with his partner R. Bruce Murray, combined the first letters of their last names and introduced their M&M’s in 1941. After the U.S. government supplied them to troops during the Great War (in part, because of their convenience), the bite-sized candies were sold to the American public in six colored varieties: red, orange, yellow, green, brown, and violet (tan replace violet in 1949). In a time before air conditioning and climate control, M&M’s became more than a tasty treat. They became an answer.
1954 saw M&M’s go from being a candy like any other to a candy like nothing else. The introduction of peanut M&M’s might seem innocuous to most, but it was the fact that M&M unveiled their trademark characters and slogan at the same time that put them into the echelon of candy greatness. The friendly, bipedal candies promising to “melt in your mouth, not in your hand” has continued uninterrupted to this day.
M&M’s now dominate the American candy market year round in more ways than one. Black and orange candies are released at Halloween, red and green at Christmas, pastels at Easter, and so on for other various holidays and causes. Of course, the most famous aspect of M&M’s culturally is the locker-room legend about the green M&M’s aphrodisiacal properties. Because of this, M&M’s made the character for their green M&M a sassy-looking skirt-clad female, and has often advertised this particular candy with a sexual slant. In fact, at Valentine’s Day, one can often by a bag of M&M’s that are exclusively green.
M&M’s dominate the cultural candy landscape often enough for inexplicable reasons. They just seem to show up. Steven Spielburg approached the company in the hope of using the candy in his film E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. M&M’s famously declined, leading to Spielburg’s usage of Reese’s Pieces (and that company’s skyrocketing sales thereafter) instead. M&M’s were also notorious for being a rider in the performance contract of the rock band Van Halen. Reportedly, a bowl of M&M’s had to be backstage at every concert with the caveat that all the brown ones be removed. Supposedly, the band did this as a way to gauge whether or not other riders in their contracts were being adequately met. Whatever the reason, lead singer David Lee Roth once demolished a dressing room upon discovering brown in the M&M bowl.
Whether they be plain, peanut, almond, mint, peanut butter, crispy, mini, or mega, M&M’s are one of our absolute favorites, not only for their taste, but their presence. Great things come in small packages. Chocolate is no different.
