What is Mars Incorporated?

Mars is the third-largest private company in the U.S. with about $33 billion in global revenue last year. Mars would be in the top 100 of the Fortune 500, ahead of McDonald’s, Starbucks, and General Mills. It employs 72,000 people, more than a third of them in America. Only about 80 work in the McLean headquarters. Its diversified galaxy of brands for man and beast are iconic, from chocolate favorites like M&M’s and Snickers to Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit and Lifesavers to pet-care products like Pedigree and Whiskas, as well as Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice. The company says it does 200 million consumer transactions a day. But despite that reach across civilization and into customer pockets, Mars is among the most secretive, insular, and little understood multinational companies around. Forbes believed Mars, Incorporated had already become sluggish and, being private, inattentive to the quarterly profit demands of Wall Street. Its chocolates trailed ten points behind those of its rival from Pennsylvania. The Uncle Ben’s division, once the leading rice producer in the United States, let market share fall to Quaker Oats’ Rice-A-Roni and Carolina and Mahatma rice from Riviana Foods until it actually lost money in 1998. In 1999, after terminating 100 of its 540 ‘associates,’ the division found a hit in frozen dinners–microwaveable bowls of rice topped with meat, vegetables, and sauce.

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