Unwrapping 30 Years as a Candy Inventor
From the guy who made printing your face on M&M’s a thing.
By Bailey Brammer
When Charlie Bucket beat the other kids who had found Golden Tickets in their Wonka Bars, it seemed like a dream come true. A poor boy with a love for sweets was now the owner of a wondrous candy empire. What could be better than that?
In Roald Dahl’s fictional world: nothing. Charlie and the entire Bucket family lucked-out big time, great glass elevator included.
But in real life, becoming the owner of a massive candy company — or, at the very least, an inventor for one — is not so easy.
Breaking into the candy business
Though you’d be hard-pressed to find a “candy creating” major at most colleges or universities, there are food science programs at several institutions, like Rutgers University, for anyone planning on a future in confections.
That’s where Dan Michael went to school before spending the next 28 years as the Research and Development Director for Mars, Inc. Ranked by Forbes as one of the largest privately-held companies in the U.S., the 108-year-old confectioner is known for creating some of the most ubiquitous treats, including Twix, Skittles, Snickers, and M&M’s.
Michael learned of the Mars job through a newspaper ad, and believes his educational background was partly to thank for helping him get hired.
However, as he soon discovered, the way candy companies test products in real life is different from how they do it at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Instead of sampling chocolate rivers and licking flavored wallpapers, Michael spent most of his time in the company’s research and development lab — which, he revealed in an interview with Atlas Obscura, was pretty much just a kitchen used for cooking prototypes.
Mars has introduced some strange candy flavors over the years. (Mike Mozart)
“We have Hobart mixers, kitchen utensils,” he said. “You’d take chocolate and melt it and temper it, and you’d bake crackers or cookies. It’d be very very crude, but that was OK, because you’re just trying to get the general idea.”
In fact, the “R&D lab,” as he called it, was a popular spot in the Mars office — not only for nibbling, but also for bouncing ideas off of one another. Because inventing new candies is not as simple as it seems. You don’t just come up with a brilliant recipe, bake a batch, and then send it to market.
“I’ve never seen a prototype that went out as first designed,” Michael said. “It’s something to get a conversation started among a group of people, and it usually goes through many iterations before it’s that finished.”
And, while Mars employees had every right to taste the sweets, Michael said the success of a new creation hinged more on customers’ opinions of it.
“In the end, we’re just trying to make products that our consumers love,” he said.
To learn more about their wants, Mars’ candy testers hosted frequent focus groups with customers and even visited their homes to poke around their kitchens. Michael recalled looking through people’s cabinets to see where they kept their candy stashes and what products were Mars’ competition.
“Other than just what type of products they have, you’re looking where they put them,” he explained. “Are they hiding those products over the refrigerator, in a drawer where their kids can’t get to them so they can be their little treat? I’ve seen that. They say, ‘Yeah, that’s my secret stash. I don’t want the kids getting at that.’ You learn all kinds of different things. It’s harder to set up than a focus group, but usually worth the effort.”
New and improved M&M’s
In his 28 years at Mars, one of Michael’s favorite projects was classic M&M’s with a personal twist. He helped develop My M&M’s, a customizable version of the treat, unveiled in 2004. Customers could add a personal saying or message to their hard-shelled candies. In 2008, the customization options expanded to include face, where customers could upload any image and have it printed on the iconic candy.
Creating My M&M’s involved developing new technology, facing new challenges, and appealing to new customers — but Michael said it was worth it.
“I worked on [My M&M’s] for five or six years, from prototype to it becoming a pretty successful business for Mars,” he said.
“The reason I loved it is that M&M’s are about colorful chocolate fun, and this took it to a new level. We built a new factory, what we called the Print Shop, to build these products. I’m very proud of how it turned out.”
Michael said My M&M’s even took the company into new territory production-wise.
“Our brands are all made on a large scale. You’re making one thing and you’re shipping it out. This was very different,” he explained.
“You’re allowing the customer to come to the website and design the one thing. But we’re doing thousands of those one things a day. There were also challenges associated with the inkjet printing, too. That involved a lot of technology. It took years.”
Once the kinks had been sorted out, My M&M’s became a successful part of the Mars empire. To this day, they can still be purchased on the brand’s website and have proven particularly popular for use in gender reveals, proposals, and wedding parties.
Perhaps his biggest takeaway after spending close to three decades in candy making was the realization that new flavors of old products are much more successful than new products altogether.
In addition to requiring a lot of time and development, most new candies are flops when they hit the market, with Michaels estimating they fail about 70% to 80% of the time.
“We don’t tend to say, ‘Let’s go invent a brand-new candy bar,’” he said. “The top 10 candy bars haven’t changed in many, many years.”
So, while Willy Wonka was known for his wild concoctions and even wackier demeanor, that view of candy makers, it turns out, is more fiction than fact.
“What people like doesn’t really change that much. It’s great to come out with new stuff. But I highly doubt that a Mexican jalapeño peanut M&M is going to replace peanut M&M’s as a big seller.”
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