M&M’s are among the world’s most loved and iconic candies. The colourful hard-shell treats can be found everywhere from shopping malls to the White House – and even in space. Here are some tasty facts you might not know about the double Ms, including where the idea came from, why the characters had a makeover and how two workers fell into a vat of chocolate.
Click or scroll through our gallery to discover the tasty tale of how M&M’s came to dominate the world of candy – counting down to the most surprising fact of all.
In the beginning, the little candies were made with Hershey chocolate. Murrie was able to promise Mars a reliable cocoa supply despite wartime rationing, so the duo agreed to collaborate. However, after the war, Mars bought back Murrie’s 20% share, and the brand eventually stopped using Hershey chocolate.
To understand where the idea for M&M’s came from, we have to rewind a few years. In the 1930s, Forrest Mars moved to Europe to set up his own business and, on a trip to Southern Spain, he saw soldiers eating chocolate. At the time, warm weather was a problem for the chocolate industry, but these candies had sugar shells that prevented them from melting. This is where Mars got the ingenious idea for M&M's – as well as the slogan 'Melts in your mouth, not in your hand'. Smarties, a similar type of sweets produced in Britain, were also potentially inspired by the same Spanish chocolates.
When M&M’s Limited was set up, its factory was in Newark, New Jersey. Then, in 1958, it moved to Hackettstown, New Jersey, to respond to a greater demand. The factory is still there today, and it's one of the largest producers of M&M’s in North America.
Today, we're used to seeing M&M’s in rectangular packets – but they came in a brown cardboard tube when they were first launched. You popped open one end, and they poured easily into your hands. Also, the lid could be snapped back on if you only felt like eating a few. The brown bags came into play in 1948.
The first M&M’s came in six colours: brown, yellow, orange, red, green and violet. Then, in 1949, violet was switched to tan. Later, the company asked customers to vote for which colour they wanted in the pack – and the winner was blue. Nowadays, M&M's come in brown, yellow, orange, red, green and blue colours. But, as fans of the candies will know, they all taste the same; the shell doesn’t signify a flavour.
For the first decade, M&M’s shells were bare and indistinguishable from similar candies. It wasn’t until 1950 that they got their signature 'm' stamp, and the slogan 'Look for the m on every piece' was born. In fact, all of Mars’ chocolates can be identified without their wrapper. Have you ever noticed the ripple on top of a Mars bar?
Forrest Mars was a stickler for quality control. He was known to call up sales associates in the middle of the night and order a batch to be recalled if he so much as saw a candy where the 'm' wasn’t printed directly in the centre. Meanwhile, the level of bacteria on the floor in a Mars factory is apparently lower than that of the average kitchen sink.
The ever-popular M&M’s Peanut Chocolate Candies were launched in 1954 – and M&M’s Peanut Butter Chocolate Candies were launched in 1989. However, Mars denies that the latter’s inspiration was Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces, which shot to fame after appearing in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. in 1982. To make matters worse, Mars was offered the opportunity to appear in the film first, but turned it down.
Between 1976 and 1987, there were no red M&M’s – but not because Mars ran out of food dye. At the time, Red Dye No. 2 was thought to be carcinogenic, and the FDA banned it. Even though the dye wasn’t used to make the chocolate candies, Mars decided to stop producing red-shelled M&M's to avoid confusion.
Ready to go global, M&M’s paid £3.5 million ($5 million) to be named 'the official snack food of the 1984 Olympic games', held in Los Angeles, California. The international sporting event needed a brand that could be recognised in every nation (at the time, Snickers was called Marathon in the UK). With worldwide recognition, M&M's expanded into Asia Pacific, Australia, Europe and Russia.
In the 1990s, sales of M&M’s dropped – and the company needed a plan. It hired ad agency BBDO and gave it a small budget to turn things around. The solution? Turning the candies into characters with distinct personalities, getting comedians to do their voices, then airing a slew of star-studded adverts. Red was sarcastic, Yellow the goofball, Blue the cool one, Green the seductress and Orange the neurotic one – and America loved them.
In 2012, M&M's used the Super Bowl to debut its second female character, Ms. Brown – the brains of the gang. The 30-second spot cost as much as £2.8 million ($4 million) and was seen by an average of 111.3 million viewers. Since then, the comedic characters have made a number of reappearances to entertain fans at halftime.
Thought M&M’s options were limited to plain, peanut and peanut butter? You’d be mistaken. You can get myriad varieties, including caramel, crispy, mini, pretzel, mint, fudge brownie, white chocolate, coffee and almond. However, the original three are, unsurprisingly, the favourites.
Fancy personalising your favourite sweet treats? An online service launched in the 2000s allows you to add custom messages and images to M&M’s. You can choose colours outside the classic six, such as Blue Lagoon, Hot Pink and Emerald Green. People use the novelty candies to celebrate graduations, birthdays and even weddings.
Next time you see the colourful M&M's characters, look closely – you'll notice a small difference in each one. That's because in January 2022, the new mascots got a subtle makeover. Their arms and legs are now a faded tint that matches their candy shells, while their shapes have also changed slightly. In the shoes department, the height of Ms. Brown's heels is much lower, while Ms. Green (pictured) now has sneakers instead of high-tops. The new look was part of Mars, Incorporated's 'global commitment to create a world where everyone feels they belong'.
The world has a serious appetite for these colourful candies, and there are M&M's factories in both Hackettstown, New Jersey, and Cleveland, Tennessee. According to an employee at the Hackettstown branch, the New Jersey factory produces approximately two billion M&M's every eight hours.
In Bloomington, Henderson, Orlando, Las Vegas, New York, Shanghai, London and Berlin, multi-storey M&M’s Worlds are big tourist attractions. Here, you’ll find candies in every shade imaginable, different flavour varieties, personalised sweets and merchandise such as mugs and T-shirts.
In January 2023, Mars released a statement putting the beloved M&M's mascots on an 'indefinite pause' and appointing actor and comedian Maya Rudolph as M&M's new 'Chief of Fun'. Some believed the reason for the retirement was due to the backlash sparked by the 2022 revamp of the characters. The move, however, was part of a PR stunt, culminating in a 2023 Super Bowl ad where the mascots announced their return.
This is a rock 'n' roll legend that actually happens to be true. In the 1980s, rock band Van Halen famously banned brown M&M's from their dressing room – but rather than being a sign of diva behaviour, it was a clever way to ensure safety and attention to detail on tour. Van Halen's productions were massive and technically complex, and the brown M&M's clause acted as a hidden test: if the crew overlooked this small detail, it indicated that they might have missed more critical safety requirements.
A tradition that can be traced back to Ronald Reagan's time in office, the White House is stocked with M&M’s featuring the presidential seal and the president's signature. Initially, this measure was taken to encourage people to snack instead of smoke in meetings, but the candies are now given as gifts to visitors. Subsequent presidents, including Bush, Clinton, Obama, Trump and Biden, have carried on the tradition.
Four to eight hours sounds like a long time to make a teeny-tiny chocolate, but the factory starts from scratch with milk, cocoa butter and sugar. After the chocolate is processed, it’s rolled into M&M’s shapes, which are then coated in a sugar shell. Finally, the individual candies are weighed out in the packaging room and sealed into bags.
As strange as it might sound, in the beginning, M&M's were only available to the military. The tubes of chocolate were included in soldiers' rations in the 1940s; they made the ideal snack, as they didn’t melt and could be resealed. It wasn’t until later in the decade that civilians could get their hands on them.
Very few brands can say that they’ve sent their products to space, but M&M’s is one of them. In 1981, the chocolate treats were included in the astronauts’ food supply on Space Shuttle Columbia – and they're still taken on space missions today. Astronauts use them as entertainment, throwing them into the air and catching them in their mouths.
In the 1970s, a rumour started that green M&M’s were an aphrodisiac. In schools across America, students could be found rummaging around for the offending shade and feeding them to their crush. At one point you could buy packets that consisted purely of green M&M’s (sold by an unofficial company). Later on, Mars capitalised on the hearsay and launched the flirtatious green M&M’s character, Ms. Green.
Mars has released lots of wacky limited-edition M&M's over the years, from Birthday Cake to Wild Cherry, but its Mexican Jalapeño Peanut flavour was the strangest of all. It was one of three new varieties introduced in early 2019 (Thai Coconut Peanut and English Toffee Peanut were the other available options). To mark the new release, M&M's unveiled a website that allowed fans to order personalised packs of confectionery by customising them with their own – or their friends' – faces.
M&M's were effectively banned in Sweden because of a trademark dispute with Swedish chocolate company Marabou. When Mars tried to sell the candies in Sweden, Marabou argued that the M&M's logo was too similar to its established ‘M’ branding and would potentially cause consumer confusion. In 2016, a Swedish court ruled in favour of Marabou, ordering Mars to stop selling the candies under that name in Sweden. Happily, all isn’t lost for Swedish fans of the candy, as M&M's have been spotted in Sweden – with capital letters on their packaging.
In a turn of events that could’ve been lifted straight from the classic film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, two workers found themselves stuck fast after they fell into a vat of chocolate at the Mars M&M factory in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania in 2022. The waist-high (Augustus) gloop was so thick that lifting them out the way they came in proved impossible. A fire crew had to resort to cutting a hole in the side of the tank to rescue the pair, who were sent to hospital for checks.
Now discover the classic candy bars we wish they’d bring back
Last updated by Natasha Lovell-Smith.