Posted on 06/20/2002 6:56:48 AM PDT by Cagey
NEW YORK (Reuters) - How sweet it is.
More than 10 million M&Ms brand candy lovers in the United States and 200 other countries have voted to add purple to the popular, button-like candy's rainbow of colors, manufacturer Masterfoods USA, a subsidiary of Mars, Inc., announced on Wednesday at a gala web-cast party in New York.
"We're very excited about the turnout and consumer involvement with M&Ms," Masterfoods USA president Paul Michaels told Reuters. Purple won, Michaels said, because "It's a popular color, it's a royal color. People love it around the world."
The new color garnered 41 percent of the vote, beating out aqua's 37 percent and pink's 19 percent. It will appear in the product's crinkly brown bags in August, adding to blue, red, yellow, orange, brown and green.
Specially marked packages containing the three choices were available prior to May 31 when "the polls" closed for the company-sponsored Global Color Vote, the second such promotion and first to include votes from outside the United States including Indonesia, Australia, Paris and China.
The candy's original six colors were brown, yellow, orange, red, green and violet, ousted in 1949 in favor of tan, in turn replaced in 1995 by U.S. voters' choice of blue.
Mars Inc. founder Forrest Mars Sr. created the candy in the late 1930s based on Spanish Civil War soldiers' hard sugar-encased chocolates. First marketed in 1941, M&Ms' similar ability to resist melting made it a staple food of World War Two American GI's.
The candy, whose letters stand for Mars and co-founder Murrie, still boasts its 1954 slogan, "The milk chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hand."
In the heated, $13 billion a year U.S. chocolate market, M&Ms has to have a hard shell. It is the world's top single brand, according to Michaels, but faces fierce competition in America from Hershey's variety of chocolate products including Hershey bars and Reeses peanut butter cups, making Hershey's the top U.S. confectionery brand, according to the Chocolate Manufacturers Association.
Probably so. And I bet that the green M&M will be happy about this. Finally, controversy will swirl around another M&M.
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