Most of what we know about the inside workings of Mars Inc comes from one person: the journalist Joël Glenn Brenner. In the early 90s, Mars let her into the company to do a Washington Post Magazine piece, before regretting the decision and clamping down. Brenner went on to write a book about Hershey’s and Mars — still the best researched source on the companies’s intertwined histories today.
Mars, Inc is interesting, of course, because it is one of the largest privately held companies in the United States — and has been for many decades now. It dominates the chocolate and pet food businesses, and makes M&Ms, Mars bars, Snickers, Milky Way bars and Pedigree and Whiskas pet food, amongst other things. It also presents a bit of a mystery: how can a privately held company, with no history of external equity financing, be run in a way that is operationally excellent over the course of eight decades? What controls exist within the company?
The answer is unusual: free from public market pressures for over 80 years, Mars’s financial incentives is designed in a slightly eccentric way.
Forrest Mars established the M&M business in the spring of 1940. M&M was short for Mars and Murrie — named after cofounder Bruce Murrie, son of William Murrie, the second in command of rival Hershey’s Chocolate.
Forrest had a difficult start to his career. H ...
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