Against All Odds: The Incredible Journey of a Man Who Transformed Adversity into Sweet Success, Turning Two Failed Ventures into a Candy Empire...
Against All Odds: The Incredible Journey of a Man Who Transformed Adversity into Sweet Success, Turning Two Failed Ventures into a Candy Empire...
...And created a family owned fortune worth of $117 billion
It’s a race that has different nicknames such as …
The Oldest Annually Held Sporting Event in the U.S,
The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports,
The Fastest Two Minutes,
And most notably, The Run for the Roses.
I’m talking of course about the Kentucky Derby.
While it’s an iconic American sport, you can trace it roots to good ole England, specifically to the little town of Epsom. It’s located about 14 miles from central London.
Epsom is the place Epsom salts were first discovered. Because of those salts, it was considered the “spa place” to be during the Georgian era.
But it’s also famous for a horse race called the Epsom Derby that has been run annually since 1780. The race takes place on the first Saturday in June and the field of horses is limited to three-year old colts and fillies.
The track itself is flat grass and runs about one and half miles long.
The event is named after the 12th Earl of Derby who after winning a coin toss decided using his name was the perfect way to honor himself. The horse that won the very first Derby, Diomed just happened to be owned by the Earl’s close friend, Sir Charles Bunbury.
But how did a race that originated in England make it to Kentucky?
Glad you asked Dear Reader because I’m going to tell you how.
But that’s not all.
I’m also going to tell you about a horse that ran in the 1940 Kentucky Derby who was owned by the wife of a man with very little education and not much money yet managed to turn his one good idea for a candy bar into a $117 billion family fortune.
Kitchen Schooled
When you once served as a general in the Civil War, sometimes towns, cities and counties are named after you. And so is the case of Pope County, Minnesota named after General John Pope who traveled through the area as part of an exploration expedition in 1849.
It’s a small county consisting of 717 total square miles, which 670 is land and the other 47 is water. The terrain itself consists of low rolling hills, carved with drainages, and dotted with lakes and ponds.
It’s perfect for agriculture. And that’s exactly why Luther and Elva Mars traveled there from Pennsylvania.
Luther got a job working as a gristmill operator. That’s the person who turns a large wheel, which grinds corn, wheat, and other grains into flour.
In 1883, Luther and Elva had their first child together, Franklin Clarence Mars.
Life back then was tough. Not only was farming hard work, but it didn’t pay a lot of money. And if you didn’t have lots of money, you didn’t have access to lots of necessities such as clean drinking water, food, and good shelter.
And unfortunately because of this, you could easily contract different types of illnesses or diseases.
When Franklin was a young child, he developed a case of polio, which made it difficult for him to walk. That was a problem for the young lad because back then, the most popular form of transportation for getting to school was walking.
And since Franklin couldn’t walk that well, his mother decided the best way for him to get an education was for her to homeschool him. And she did so in the kitchen.
When she wasn’t teaching Franklin the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, she taught him how to cook, specially making candy treats, which he loved.
As Franklin got older, he learned to walk with the help of a cane. Eventually he was able to finish his education at the neighbor school. However by that time, he had already been experimenting with different flavor combinations and methods for making candy.
In fact at age 19, Franklin created a candy product that he marketed as Taylor's molasses chips, which were bits of molasse shaped into honey cones and dipped in chocolate. He made the first sale of his new candy bar in 1902.
But that’s not all that happened.
That same year, Franklin married his sweetheart – Ethel Kissack, a schoolteacher. And by 1904, the couple welcomed the birth of their first child, Forrest.
Some Things Just Don’t Work Out
Since Franklin didn’t have a lot of money, it was a struggle to keep his new candy business afloat. He had no choice but to set is aside and focus on supporting his family.
Fortunately he found a job as a salesman with a small company located in Wadena, which is where the family of three moved to set up their new home.
Things just weren’t working out for Franklin. His candy business had gone bust and now is marriage was doing the same thing. Just four years after they got married, in 1910 the two filed for divorce.
Now I can’t tell you exactly how Franklin met Ethel Healy or even how long they knew each other, but I can tell you they got married the same year he divorced his first wife.
One year later, the new couple moved to Tacoma, Washington where with the support of Ethel, he set up The Mars Corporation.
Franklin began making candy again and he did so at home in the kitchen of the couple’s home. Ethel pitched in and helped in whatever way Franklin needed.
The two made a buttercream candy with a soft creamy filling encased by a rich chocolatey exterior. Yet despite having created a high quality, delicious tasting candy bar, it produced very little in sales.
In fact sales were so bad that those he owed money to … his creditors laid claim to his business and personal assets to pay off his debts.
It seemed that Franklin was doomed to fail in the candy business. So far, every candy bar he created failed. So in 1920 Franklin made the decision to move back to his home state, Minnesota.
Try Until You Win
While his track record for selling candy wasn’t good, his determination to be successful was unwavering. He just wasn’t ready to give up. So he set up another business adventure, which he named the Mar-O-Bar Company.
Then he started mixing up ingredients again in his kitchen. This time he blended together two pieces of thin cookies covered with chocolate with whipped cream in the middle.
This would now serve as his and Ethel’s flagship product for their new company.
To his delight, this candy bar achieved a greater degree of success than his first two attempts, producing roughly $100,000 in sales. It seems Franklin had finally made a mark into the candy industry.
While the mar-o-bar was generating healthy sales, it also came with its share of problems. One big one was that the candy bar kept cracking when being transported to stores. This was costing him money.
Franklin knew he had to either improve on the mar-o-bar or come up with something entirely different.
And he’d get the inspiration for his next candy bar while eating lunch with his son Forrest in a soda shop.
One thing you should know is that Franklin and Forrest had been somewhat estranged from one other for almost 30 years. You see when Franklin divorced his first wife Ethel, she maintained custody of their son (and daughter Patricia).
For help, she sent Forrest to live with her parents in Canada where he attended high school. He was a smart kid and it showed in the grades he received. After graduating from school, he returned back to the U.S. where he studied at the University of California and then onto Yale University graduating with a degree in industrial engineering.
Things were looking good for Forrest until he was arrested in Chicago for affixing Camel cigarette ads along lampposts that lined the city’s streets. But he did so without permission. And he also told people he owed money to that he would pay them, which he never did.
Needing someone to bail him out, Forrest called his father Franklin for help. Franklin put up the bail for his son to get out of jail.
Afterwards the two decided to have a milkshake in a near-by soda shop. The two men were joking around with one another when Forrest said to his father something along the lines of, “why don't you put this in a candy bar?”
Franklin went straight back to Minneapolis and started working on creating a candy bar that tasted like a malted milkshake. Franklin Mars called this new creation, The Milky Way Bar.
He introduced the new candy bar into the marketplace in 1923. And what a hit it was. Sales skyrocketed, immediately generating a whopping $69,000. The following year, the Milky Way bar exploded in popularity, earning over $800,000 in sales, which in today’s money is worth more than $14 million.
The truth is that single candy bar opened the door for his company to become a nationally known business. In 1926, Franklin renamed his company Mars Inc. That same year he moved the business to a new plant outside Chicago where he created two more new candy bars: the Mars Almond bar and the Three Musketeers.
One Race, One Horse, One Candy Bar
Yet that wasn’t the only candy bar Franklin and his son created that year. They developed a bar that was made up of a soft sticky mixture of nougat peanuts and caramel coated in milk chocolate.
But they needed a name for their new candy bar. They tossed around a few names but nothing seems to fit. Then Franklin suddenly got the idea of naming the bar after one of his favorite horses … Snickers.
You see, the Mars family loved horses. In fact Franklin had bought a farm in Tennessee with 30 stables where he and his second wife Ethel raised horses. He even built a racing track because Ethel loved racing some of the horses.
Ethel loved racing horses so much that she felt one of her horses, Gallahadion was fast enough to compete in one of the country’s most cherished races … the Kentucky Derby.
Now as I mentioned earlier, the Kentucky Derby didn’t originate in Kentucky as most people think. Nope, instead it was modeled after the Derby Stakes, which was a race that had been run in England since 1780. It took place at Epsom Downs racecourse, which was 1.5 miles long.
The race was started by the 12 Earl of Derby, along with some of his friends. But it was the grandson of famed explorer William Clark that brought the Derby to Kentucky.
You see while traveling throughout England and France, Meriweather Lewis Clark Jr. just happened to attend one of the Derby Stakes.
Impressed with what he had watched, Meriweather raised enough money to build Churchill Downs on a swatch of land that had been given to him by his grandfather.
On May 17, 1875, some 10,000 people attended the first Kentucky Derby, which featured a field of 15 three-year-old thoroughbreds. The winning horse, Aristides, finished with a time of 2:37.75 and was ridden by Oliver Lewis, an African American jockey.
In 1940, ridden by jockey C. Bierman, Gallahadion entered the field with eight other horses. The horse was considered a rank outsider and not expected to win. All eyes were on Bimelech, who was the favorite.
But Galllhadion pulled an upset and won the race, beating all expectations. And he went on to win the San Vicente Handicap, which is held in Santa Anita. He also placed second in the Classics Stakes, second in the Derby Trail Stakes and third in the Preakness Stakes.
It seems Ethel’s instincts about Gallahadion being a winner were right on the money. And so were Franklin and Forrest’s instincts to name their new candy bar after Snickers the horse because it too was an immediate success.
For the first time the company could now afford to have a full-time sales team to help with expansion of the business. He also trademarked the name Milky Way.
Franklin’s company now had a firm grip over the American candy industry.
Summer Months Make a Mess
Although one of Franklin’s biggest rivals was the Hershey Company, it would also become a long-time business partnership.
That’s because to make his candy bars, he would buy the chocolate from Hershey. In fact the Mars Company was one of Hershey’s biggest customers, purchasing as much as $7.5 million in chocolate coating per year.
In truth this was a partnership that would extend through multiple generations and help both companies achieve worldwide success with one candy in particular, M&Ms.
You see, one of the problems that chocolate candy makers faced in the summer months was that the chocolate melted quickly. For customers it was problem because the melted chocolate got on their hands and cloths. For both the Mars Company and Hershey, it meant sales fell off during warmer temperatures. But at the time, neither company had a solution until sometime in 1936.
That’s right around the time Forrest Mars was traveling through Spain when the Spanish Civil War broke out.
Mars is said to have seen British soldiers eating chocolate pellets with a hard sugar coating that prevented them from melting. Mars was excited by the idea of creating a product that could withstand high temperatures.
He returned home and began making his own candy pellets, which he covered in a harden-type chocolate. Actually he partnered with the Hershey Corporation to bring this new candy idea to life.
They called the new candy, M&M. The two M’s stand for the last names of the two people who invented it: Mars for Forrest Mars and Murry for Bruce Murry, the son of Hershey’s President.
The design for the candy was patented on March 3, 1941, and production began that same year in Newark, New Jersey.
At first, the candies were sold in cardboard tubes and marketed to the military as a snack that could travel well in different climates. In fact many soldiers in World War II ate M&Ms as part of their rations.
However by the late 1940s, M&Ms were widely available to the public. The popular slogan, “It melts in your mouth, not in your hands” was trademarked in 1954.
Forest continued to experiment with different products and was more aggressive in his business acumen than that of his father. It actually created quite a conflict between the two … one that wasn’t easily resolved.
Rather than continue to fight it out, Frank paid Forrest $50,000 to leave the company and start one of his own. He also gave him rights to use the Milky Way bar. And so in 1932 Forrest moved to England where he got a job working for prestigious European chocolate brands like Tobler and Nestle.
With global experience under his belt Forrest was now eager to make a name for himself in the candy industry. But rather than invent a brand new bar from scratch, he decided to make a version of the already popular Milky Way bar.
He opened up a factory in Slough England, adjusted the Milky Way recipe to better suit European tastes and began making the new bars. Each bar was handmade and covered with Cadbury chocolate.
Forrest called his new candy the Mars Bar. And if you were to guess it was an immediate success, you’d be right. And just like M&Ms were distributed to troops, so was the Mars Bar.
In fact between 1939 and 1945, the Mars Bar was given to UK soldiers and German prisoners of War.
Taking the Reins
You might have a famous candy company, and you might have made yourself lots of money, but you might not have the greatest of health.
And so was the case with Franklin Mars. Sometime in the later part of 1934, Frank Mars was traveling out east on business when he got very sick. In fact on March 30, 1935, he was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital where he was treated for heart and kidney related issues.
Unfortunately, 10 days later, Franklin Mars died from a heart condition.
Now the question was who would run the family business. Since his wife Ethel had helped in the early days of building their business, she stepped in to run the operation.
She also got help from Franklin’s half-brother. They ran the company for about 10 years.
However when Ethel died in 1945, Forrest decided it was time to return home to the U.S. And he now became head of the company. With the connections he had made in Europe and ones in the U.S., Forrest wasted no time in expanding the business.
And we’re talking not just candy. He crossed into other industries including pet foods where he developed the famous brand, Whiskas cat food.
He also helped developed household foods such as Uncle Ben's rice, which quickly became a favorite family stable.
While he was busting into new markets, he also kept busy developing new lines of candies. Forrest Mars released dozens of new
products including Skittles, Three Musketeers, and Starburst to name just a few.
His goal was to ensure that every confectionary aisle in every grocery store the world would be stocked with the company's products.
With the many products he introduced to the world, Forrest Mars made sure the company his father started became a legacy in the industry.
And what a legacy it remains. The Mars Corporation now owns over 50 world-popular brands and deals in confectionery, pet care products, main meals foods, and electronic payment systems.
The corporation has facilities in 60 countries and a market containing over 200 countries and territories. And to this day, the factory in Slough England still produces the Mars Bar.
The Mars Company produces over $45 billion in annual sales and is ranked by Forbes as the fourth largest privately held company in the United States.
As for the Mars family, they have a combined net worth of $117 billion, which makes them America's second-richest family.
Franklin Clarence Mars was initially buried on this estate, but his remains were later moved to a private vault at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis after the sale of his estate.
Forrest Mars lived until the age of 95. He died of natural causes at his home in Miami.
Awesome Quotes by Awesome People
“I’m not a candy maker, I’m empire minded.” - Forrest Mars