Our UK presence was established in 1932 when Forrest Mars arrived in Slough with the recipe for a new kind of chocolate bar. When the MARS bar was launched to the British public, it was a chocolate recipe not seen before in the UK. At that time most chocolate was a simple solid block but MARS changed all that with combined layers of nougat, caramel and thick milk chocolate. Forrest rented a factory, formed Mars Confections Ltd on the Slough Trading Estate and within a year his workforce had grown from 12 to 100 employees, all making MARS bars.
This success was further strengthened when it occurred to Forrest Mars, while working in the UK, to give chocolate a protective candy coat to stop it from melting. The idea became M&Ms candies and their success was ensured when they were adopted as a staple ration for US forces. Today M&Ms are famous the world over. But there is more to us than just snack foods. It was also in the '30s that Forrest Mars made the first move into pet food. Forrest pioneered the development of the European pet food industry by combining modern manufacturing techniques with nutritional science. A successful formula that has since been transferred to the rest of the world.
You are sure to recognise some of our brands, which are used and trusted on every continent and in almost every country on earth… PEDIGREE, WHISKAS, CESAR and SHEBA.
We were also the first company to apply modern manufacturing techniques to parboil rice on a large scale. In 1938 UNCLE BEN'S long grain rice was launched.
Today, our drive to innovate and meet your needs is as powerful as ever. Our ideas, like putting pet food into pouches under the PEDIGREE and WHISKAS brands, providing two minute microwaveable rice under the UNCLE BEN'S brand, and creating ice cream versions of your favourite brands, have changed the way we and our pets eat.
