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Authors: Steve Almond
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outlets—which are themselves being driven out of business—or at discount stores.
This is just business. Retailers want things as simple and profitable as possible. If stores can deal with a half-dozen companies and fill their racks and get paid, why should they bother with a smaller candy company that makes only one product? The problem with this logic, Echeandia observed, is that candy isn’t like other products. There’s no great advantage to stocking, say, a huge variety of laundry soaps, because consumers view this product as an impersonal necessity. But with candy, the buy impulse is intimate and discretionary, most often triggered by the very sight of a particular piece. More variety means more triggers. And the longer you keep a consumer in front of the racks, the more triggers you hit. I myself have always been unreasonably drawn to candy suppliers with an abundant rack (such as the Old Barrel) for this very reason.
But the racks are just a means to an end, which is to achieve hegemony over the average American mouth. Tastes are not inborn, after all. They are developed. The reason Americans favor milk chocolate over dark is because Milton Hershey got his bars into enough American mouths to establish our collective taste. His interest was not in establishing variety, but just the opposite. He wanted everyone eating the same bar—his.
Given this paradigm, it became clear why the candy giants were so eager to establish beachheads in China, the former Soviet Union, and the developing world. Advertising and marketing campaigns can go a long way toward selling tennis shoes. But with candy bars, it’s all about the intimate experience of the product in a person’s mouth, because eventually the tastes and textures of that experience—the creaminess of the chocolate, the crunch of the peanuts, the elasticity of the caramel—take up residence in the sense memory. This is why most people can conjure up, so precisely, the experience of eating their favorite candy bar. In the common parlance this is called a craving.
The Big Three were locked in an economic battle with billions of dollars at stake, Echeandia explained. So naturally, they’d tried to become all things to all people. They never used to make seasonal pieces. That niche was left to smaller companies. Now they all made special pieces for the holidays. When you ate a Milky Way in Christmas foil, you were actually reinforcing the desire for that brand. They also had attempted to provide variety by continually introducing new bars. Most of these were actually brand extensions, the confectionary equivalent to Hollywood sequels: Reese’s Peanut Butter Sticks, M&M’s Crispy, and so on. To cite a particularly blatant recent example: Mars recently phased out its namesake bar and replaced it with the Snickers Almond, a nearly identical bar, in the hopes of cashing in on its hottest brand name.
Consolidation had not been limited to the merchandising side. Many of the larger distributors would no longer carry candy that didn’t sell to the major chains. This was crucial for smaller companies, which often couldn’t afford their own fleet of refrigerated trucks and storage spaces, meaning they couldn’t ship their products when the weather got too warm. The Big Three, by contrast, had built their own distribution systems. As Brenner detailed in her book, Mars had established dominance in the Arab world by building refrigerated distribution centers and in-store displays.
The Big Three were also at a huge advantage when it came to securing raw materials. Both Hershey’s and Mars, for instance, owned cocoa plantations. They made their own chocolate, selling the surplus to smaller companies. They had enough buying power to minimize the fluctuations of the commodities market. Thanks to the political muscle of domestic sugar producers, for instance, American sugar prices were being kept artificially inflated. It had become cheaper to produce certain candies in
This is just business. Retailers want things as simple and profitable as possible. If stores can deal with a half-dozen companies and fill their racks and get paid, why should they bother with a smaller candy company that makes only one product? The problem with this logic, Echeandia observed, is that candy isn’t like other products. There’s no great advantage to stocking, say, a huge variety of laundry soaps, because consumers view this product as an impersonal necessity. But with candy, the buy impulse is intimate and discretionary, most often triggered by the very sight of a particular piece. More variety means more triggers. And the longer you keep a consumer in front of the racks, the more triggers you hit. I myself have always been unreasonably drawn to candy suppliers with an abundant rack (such as the Old Barrel) for this very reason.
But the racks are just a means to an end, which is to achieve hegemony over the average American mouth. Tastes are not inborn, after all. They are developed. The reason Americans favor milk chocolate over dark is because Milton Hershey got his bars into enough American mouths to establish our collective taste. His interest was not in establishing variety, but just the opposite. He wanted everyone eating the same bar—his.
Given this paradigm, it became clear why the candy giants were so eager to establish beachheads in China, the former Soviet Union, and the developing world. Advertising and marketing campaigns can go a long way toward selling tennis shoes. But with candy bars, it’s all about the intimate experience of the product in a person’s mouth, because eventually the tastes and textures of that experience—the creaminess of the chocolate, the crunch of the peanuts, the elasticity of the caramel—take up residence in the sense memory. This is why most people can conjure up, so precisely, the experience of eating their favorite candy bar. In the common parlance this is called a craving.
The Big Three were locked in an economic battle with billions of dollars at stake, Echeandia explained. So naturally, they’d tried to become all things to all people. They never used to make seasonal pieces. That niche was left to smaller companies. Now they all made special pieces for the holidays. When you ate a Milky Way in Christmas foil, you were actually reinforcing the desire for that brand. They also had attempted to provide variety by continually introducing new bars. Most of these were actually brand extensions, the confectionary equivalent to Hollywood sequels: Reese’s Peanut Butter Sticks, M&M’s Crispy, and so on. To cite a particularly blatant recent example: Mars recently phased out its namesake bar and replaced it with the Snickers Almond, a nearly identical bar, in the hopes of cashing in on its hottest brand name.
Consolidation had not been limited to the merchandising side. Many of the larger distributors would no longer carry candy that didn’t sell to the major chains. This was crucial for smaller companies, which often couldn’t afford their own fleet of refrigerated trucks and storage spaces, meaning they couldn’t ship their products when the weather got too warm. The Big Three, by contrast, had built their own distribution systems. As Brenner detailed in her book, Mars had established dominance in the Arab world by building refrigerated distribution centers and in-store displays.
The Big Three were also at a huge advantage when it came to securing raw materials. Both Hershey’s and Mars, for instance, owned cocoa plantations. They made their own chocolate, selling the surplus to smaller companies. They had enough buying power to minimize the fluctuations of the commodities market. Thanks to the political muscle of domestic sugar producers, for instance, American sugar prices were being kept artificially inflated. It had become cheaper to produce certain candies in
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