Ovaltine is a chocolaty drink made from malt extract. In the late nineteenth century, a Swiss scientist named Georg Wander invented a process of easily extracting a nutritious syrup from malted barley of the sort used to make beer. Wander believed that he had discovered, in his malt extract, a possible solution to the scourge of malnutrition, or at least a healthful supplement to the average diet.
Perhaps he had, but the problem was that no one was interested in eating Dr. Wander's goo. His son Albert, however, realized that if he mixed the malt extract with sugar, whey, beet extract, and eggs, people would be interested in at least trying the stuff. Albert marketed his product as a powder and called it "Ovomaltine," from the eggs (in Latin, ovo) and malt it contained.
Served hot as an energy drink at Swiss ski resorts, Ovomaltine was an instant hit and was subsequently exported all over Europe. When it hit the U.K. in 1904, it was sold under the shortened name Ovaltine, and it was Ovaltine that shortly thereafter took America by storm. By this time, the chocolate flavor of Ovaltine had crowded out all the other varieties, and it was advertised as the hot chocolate drink that was good for you.
Ovaltine was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic largely because of an aggressive and clever advertising campaign of sponsoring children's radio shows. In the U.K. in 1939, more than five million children were members of a club based on a radio serial called The League of Ovaltineys. In the United States, Ovaltine sponsored both Little Orphan Annie and Captain Midnight, as well as several popular TV shows in the 1950s. And for Mom and Dad, folklore held that Ovaltine, mixed with raw eggs, was a powerful aphrodisiac.
Further marketing resounded the facts that Sir Edmond Hilary had Ovaltine during his Mount Everest expedition, and that Muhamad Ali was a promoter of the brand.
Sadly, as the Ovaltine generation aged, sales slumped, and Ovaltine has in recent years been passed from one owner to another. Perhaps most tellingly, it appears that Ovaltine, once touted as a high-energy pick-me-up, is now viewed by the public as a bedtime sleep aid.
In the beginning, there was Franklin Mars, who started a small candy company in Tacoma, Washington, in 1911. In 1923, Mars, by then in Minneapolis, Minnesota, invented the Milky Way candy bar, which became a national hit and was soon followed by his equally successful Three Musketeers and Snickers bars.
By 1928, Mars' son, Forrest, had graduated from Yale and joined the family business. But Forrest and his father did not get along, and finally the elder Mars presented Forrest with a proposition he couldn't refuse: take the recipe and foreign rights to the Milky Way bar and leave the country. Forrest skedaddled to England and started his own candy company, churning out Milky Ways for an appreciative British public. As a sideline, he also started England's first pet food company, replacing the table scraps on which British pets had, until then, subsisted.
In 1939, as World War II gathered steam in Europe, Forrest Mars returned to the United States, bringing with him the American rights to a British candy called Smarties, small circular tablets of chocolate coated in a shell of hard candy. To sell his new product, Mars went into partnership with R. Bruce Murrie, who just happened to be the adopted son of chocolate magnate Milton Hershey. Unfortunately, there already was candy named Smarties in the market in the United States, a small, tart confection sold in a roll, so Mars and Murrie needed a new name. In renaming Smarties for the American market, Mars simply combined his last initial with that of his partner, Murrie, and "M&Ms" was born.
Originally sold in paper tubes, M&Ms were an instant hit, especially because they didn't melt during the summer when candy sales traditionally slumped, due to their "meltproof" hard candy shell. That shell also made M&Ms a natural choice for the U.S. Army to issue to its soldiers as part of standard rations during the war, and in 1954 Mars adopted the slogan "The milk chocolate melts in your mouth-not in your hand," which is still used today.
After his father's death in 1934, Forrest fought a long legal battle to take control of Mars, Inc., finally succeeding in 1962. Today Mars manufactures M&Ms, Milky Way, Snickers, Three Musketeers, and other candy as well as Uncle Ben's Rice (which Forrest Mars perfected), and Kal Kan and Pedigree pet foods. Kicking his son out of the country may have been the best business decision Frank Mars ever made.
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