This Easter, kids on hunts for chocolate eggs and bunnies might get an unwanted lesson in global economics. Due to droughts in cocoa-producing regions and tariff uncertainty, chocolate is expected to cost significantly more.
In 1988, Fortune writer Bill Saporito took a close look at the globalization of the chocolate and candy industry in a feature about the ultrawealthy Mars family, penetrating their “cult of secrecy” to reveal a company, Mars Incorporated, struggling with growing pains. At the time, the candy and pet food conglomerate—founded in 1911 and family-owned to this day—was daunted by European competitor Nestlé’s “mountain of $24 billion of sales and marketing power,” and was attempting to expand its reach in the U.K. and continental-Europe markets.
The family’s interpersonal drama also created plenty of liabilities, Saporito wrote: Brothers Forrest Jr. and John Mars, then co-running the company, seemed hell-bent on hampering the business’s growth potential with their simmering conflict. (This family competitiveness may have been handed down across generations: Founder Frank Mars, the brothers’ grandfather, “sent his son packing in 1932, when he gave Forrest Sr. the foreign rights to manufacture Milky Way, and announced: ‘This company isn’t big enough for both of us. Go to some other country and start your own business.’”)
Mars prided itself on “a culture of egalitarianism and individualism” and had pioneered the then novel concept of an open-plan office space, with a sea of desks “designed to smash any barriers to communication and to inhibit narrow functionalism.” But the fraternal power struggle between Forrest Jr. and John created chaos within Mars’s corporate culture. “Do you know what happens when the fiberglass on a Corvette begins to crack?” a recently departed exec asked Saporito. “There’s no way to stop it. Well, there are hundreds of stress cracks in that organization.”
Meanwhile even if Forrest Jr.’s “propensity to belch, pick his nose, or take off his socks and shoes during meetings” were off-putting to some “Martians,” evidently “one co-worker found this package quite alluring,” wrote Saporito. Forrest was then in the process of “ending his 32-year marriage to merge with a 30-ish Mars associate”—and the looming fear of an “enormous divorce settlement” weighed heavily on Mars Inc.’s financial prospects.
The company survived Forrest Jr.’s 1990 divorce. Today, Mars operates more than 20 factories in the U.S. as well as production facilities in Canada, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Australia. Its confections and pet food products span the globe under a wide range of brand names, from Milky Way to Whiskas.
It remains to be seen whether the company’s successful globalization, seen as an essential growth path back in 1988, will now backfire for a U.S.-based company in the tariff-riddled global financial landscape ahead. But for now, with an acquisition of Kellogg parent company Kellanova announced in August, the Mars universe continues to expand.
