Forrest Edward Mars Sr. (March 21, 1904 – July 1, 1999) was an American billionaire businessman and the driving force of the candy company Mars Inc. until 1973.

Born in Minnesota, his father Frank Mars established the Mars company during Forrest's childhood. As a young man, Forrest Mars started working at the company in 1929, the same year when it moved over to Chicago. Wanting to expand abroad and becoming estranged from his father, Forrest moved to Europe, where he founded his own Mars company in the English town of Slough. There, he created the Mars chocolate bar (1932) and Maltesers (1936), making Mars a major candy company in Britain. Mars also expanded into petfoods, founding Pedigree Petfoods.

After the start of World War II, Mars resided in the United States, where he created a joint venture that led to the creation of M&M's chocolate in 1941, and in another venture with a Texan businessman created Uncle Ben's Rice. He was raised by his maternal grandparents in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Canada, after his parents' divorce when he was just a child. He rarely saw his father, who remarried to Ethel V. Mars in 1910. He had a half sister, Patricia Mars.

After high school, he entered the University of California, Berkeley, and later transferred to Yale University, where he completed a degree in industrial engineering in 1928.

Career

As an adult, Forrest Mars reunited with his father at Mars, Inc. However, the pair ran into a disagreement when Forrest wanted to expand abroad while his father did not. For a few years he worked at the new plant in Chicago and supervised the development of the Snickers and 3 Musketeers bars. Forrest would claim that it was he who proposed the new product that would become the iconic Milky Way bar after drinking a malted milkshake. Frances Herdlinger, a newly hired chemist at the Chicago lab of Mars Inc, remembered "Forrest Mars would turn up often with something new for us to try." After a quarrel with his father, Mars was removed from the company. He took a $50,000 buyout from his father, including foreign rights to Milky Way, and moved to England where he created the Mars bar and Maltesers while estranged from his father in 1933.

After he returned to the United States, Mars started his own food business, Food Products Manufacturing, where he established the Uncle Ben's Rice line and a pet food business, Pedigree. In partnership later with Bruce Murrie, Mars developed M&M's, the chocolate candy covered in a crunchy shell which "melts in your mouth, not in your hands," in 1940. They were possibly modeled after Smarties. Peanut M&M's were introduced in 1954 although Forrest had been allergic to peanuts his entire life. Murrie later left the business.

Following the death of his father, Forrest Mars took over the family business, Mars, Inc, merging it with his own company in 1964. he married Audrey Ruth Meyer (b. May 25, 1910, in Chicago, d. June 15, 1989, in Washington, D.C.), and they had three children – Forrest Jr., John, and Jacqueline. Ethel M was purchased by Mars, Inc. in 1988. Despite retiring, Mars continued to often phone and complain against his children about his perceived concerns about how the Mars company was being run, at old age into the 1990s.

Mars died at age 95 on July 1, 1999, in Miami, Florida, having amassed a fortune of $4 billion. Forbes magazine ranked him as the 30th richest American (Forrest Jr. and John were 29th and 31st, respectively) and as the 103rd wealthiest person in the world. He left the business jointly to his three children.

Legacy

Mars had a "disagreeable" personality, but was highly intelligent in business practices. He kept his Mars businesses strictly private, which included a ban on talking to the press and not publishing financial accounts.

See also

  • List of billionaires

References

Further reading

  • Brenner, Joel Glenn (1999). The Emperors of Chocolate. Random House. .
  • Cadbury, Deborah (2010). Chocolate Wars. HarperCollins. .
  • Profile in Fortune Magazine, published in 1967, republished March 31, 2013. [http://fortune.com/2013/03/31/the-sweet-secret-world-of-forrest-mars-fortune-1967/]