"mars" news and stories

Remember all the hoopla about several chocolate companies who were planning on changing the way they made their chocolate? Well, don't include Mars in all that talk.

The company (which makes Milky Way, M&Ms, Snickers, Dove Chocolate, and other chocolate candies and bars) has announced that they are going to keep making their chocolate with 100% cocoa butter. Some have been pushing for the industry to change to cheaper, healthier vegetable oils and fats. One thing I didn't realize is that the FDA says that if a company changes to those oils, they can't call it "chocolate."

The company says that even though they could have saved money by switching, that would hurt the taste of the chocolate. Thank you Mars!

I think that Cybele, who writes Candy Blog, gets a lot of her candy samples from convenience stores, which are more likely to stock the limited edition varieties of bars than the average grocery store. It just so happened that, while on a little bit of a road trip, I spotted this Limited Edition Triple Chocolate Twix in such a store.

The bar had the same milky, sweet chocolate covering that most Twix bars do, but also had a layer of chocolate caramel on top of a chocolate cookie. The cookie went wonderfully in the bar. It had a good chocolate flavor and was very light and tender, especially when compared to the much firmer cookie that is usually included in the candy bar. The caramel did not seem all that chocolaty when eaten alone, but it really tied the chocolate coating in to the chocolate cookie. When taken as a whole, the bar was excellent. It was lighter and more addictive than the standard Twix, with a good balance of chocolate and sweetness. It's hard to say how long a limited edition bar will stick around once it has been released, but this flavor is clearly a winner, so let's hope it is available for more than a couple of weeks.

In Times Square one of the most noticeable landmarks is the Hershey's company store, where you can pick up chocolates, chocolate-themed toys and more chocolates. But Hershey's is about to have some competition because Mars, Inc. has opened its own store just across the street. The rival chocolate company's store, M&M's World, is 25,000 sq. ft., larger than the existing Hershey's store, and has a huge selection of M&Ms-themed stuff. In addition to the world's largest display of M&Ms candies, the store features a 21-foot Miss Green M&M dressed up as Lady Liberty and a M&M's(R) color mood analyzer, which should clear up any of those middles school rumors about the differences between red, yellow and green M&Ms.

This is actually the third M&M's World store, as one opened in Las Vegas in 1997 and another in Orlando just about one year ago. A spokesman said that they didn't intend to be across from the Hershey's store, although it's pretty clear that they weren't worried about the competition. He said, "We wanted to be in New York, we wanted to be in Times Square, and then we wanted to be in the best location we could find. Coincidentally, that happened to be across the street from another chocolate brand."

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I don't know how many of you folks out there have noticed that it isn't just the perfume makers who are using those scented ads in magazines. Pepsi did the same when it released its Black Cherry / Vanilla flavored Diet Pepsi Jazz. Scratch and sniff ads have been around for awhile but for dog food? Pedigree tried them at supermarkets and pet stores. Have you walked into a bakery and smelled that warm and comforting aroma of just baked bread? My local bakery has an electronic dispenser that sprays an artificial baking scent into the store every few minutes. Mars has been scenting its M&M World retail stores with a chocolate smell to make the experience more enveloping. Verizon recently did the same in its stores with the release of LG Chocolate phones. Do you remember smellavision from old TV cartoons? Well it's here. ScentAndrea has an 8,000 scent dispensing, flat panel screen monitor available in stores like Kroger's and Wal-mart to help make sales.

Scent is the most powerful of the human senses, and the most primitive. This is something I first learned when I was studying psychology in college. The right scent can trigger deep and long forgotten emotions and bring up feelings of every type. Marketers have known about this for a long time, which is why scent is starting to play a bigger role in many products advertising budgets. The best part about it from the sales perspective is that smell can help nudge you in a certain emotional direction without the person even noticing it. Sort of like a nasal version of Vulcan mind control. To boldly go, where no one has smelled before. Keep your eye's out... Uh, nose, for a lot more scent marketed advertising to come.

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Alain Ducasse, one of the most successful restaurateurs in the world and holder of 9 Michelin stars, has begun to prepare meals that will go where no haute cuisine - or even anything worthy of being called a cuisine - has gone before: outer space. The chef is working with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the French National Center for Space Studies to create gourmet foods that can be packaged for consumption on space flights, giving astronauts a taste of something better than the garden variety rations then get now.

Currently, astronauts have an extremely limited array of food to choose from when on a flight, the vast majority of it being freeze-dried or vacuum-sealed. They have very limited cooking supplies and no fresh vegetables, leading them to crave foods like salads and hot coffee when they land back on Earth. Ducasse's line, which is called Space Food, will still have to be packaged specially, but will include favorites like rice pudding (in soy milk) and chicken with Thai veggies.

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