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In 1966, Forrest Mars Sr. agreed to a single sit-down interview with Candy Industry & Confectioner’s Journal. The profile that ran was largely favourable. He felt misquoted anyway, and from that moment until his death in 1999 he gave no further sit-down interviews and avoided photographers wherever he could. His three children inherited the no-press posture along with the company. Their children inherited it. The current generation of Mars cousins, the fourth, still operates that way.
Mars Inc., the company they control, is one of the largest privately held businesses in the United States. Its 2024 net sales were $54.6 billion, a figure the company only disclosed because it issued a bond prospectus in early 2025 to help finance its roughly $36 billion acquisition of Kellanova. The three surviving Mars heirs — Jacqueline, John, and the estate of the late Forrest Jr. — are consistently ranked among the wealthiest families in America. They are also among the most successfully invisible.
Jacqueline Mars lives in a farmhouse in The Plains, Virginia. John Mars lives in a similarly unremarkable property near Jackson, Wyoming. Neither has ever given a sit-down television interview. Neither owns a yacht of the size catalogued in superyacht registries. Neither has been photographed at Davos, Sun Valley, or the Allen and Company conference except by accident, in the background of someone else’s shot.
What Forrest Sr. actually told his children
Joël Glenn Brenner’s The Emperors of Chocolate, the only serious piece of long-form reporting ever conducted on the company, remains the canonical account of Mars’ culture of secrecy. Brenner spent the better part of a decade on the book. Her on-the-ground access came in the late 1980s, when Hershey took share of the U.S. chocolate market away from Mars and the company briefly opened its door to a Washington Post reporter. Once her magazine article ran, the door closed again.
What the reporting describes is not a single dramatic memo but a long, enforced posture. Forrest Sr. believed publicity invited competitors, regulators, unionisers, and acquirers. Silence was a moat. Every dollar a competitor spent trying to figure out Mars’ margins was a dollar not spent improving their own product. He gave one interview, in 1966, decided he had been misquoted, and never gave another. He told his children that publicity, even good publicity, could have bad consequences.
The policy outlived him. Forrest Sr. died in Miami in 1999 at the age of 95. His children kept the posture in force. His grandchildren kept it in force. The fourth-generation cousins, now active in the company’s governance, have kept it in force.
The 1947 letter, and what it actually said
There is a 1947 document from Forrest Sr. that survives in the Mars family archive, and it is sometimes invoked as the founding text of Mars culture. It is not a publicity ban. It is a short letter titled “The Objective of the Company,” in which Forrest Sr. set out the principle of mutuality of benefits — the idea that suppliers, employees, consumers, and shareholders should all gain from the company’s success.
In 1983, Jacqueline, John, and Forrest Jr. formalised that one-page objective as the Five Principles of Mars: Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency, and Freedom. It is the document Mars itself refers back to in corporate communications.
The privacy posture was a separate, parallel practice — enforced by example and by habit rather than by a written rule you could photocopy. That is part of why it has been so durable. There is no policy to repeal.
Why the houses are small on purpose
Jacqueline Mars’ Virginia farmhouse is a working horse property. She breeds and shows horses competitively. John Mars’ Wyoming residence is modest by ultra-high-net-worth standards, the kind of place a senior partner at a regional law firm might own. Forrest Jr., who died in 2016, lived for decades in McLean, Virginia, near the Mars Inc. headquarters.
The pattern is deliberate. Forrest Sr. raised his children in England, continental Europe, and the United States with a stated philosophy that the company came first and personal display was vulgar. Brenner’s book describes Forrest Sr. driving himself to work, eating in the company cafeteria with line workers, and being paid on the same kind of performance-tied formula every Mars associate was paid on.
The children absorbed it. John Mars reportedly flies commercial when he can. Jacqueline has been photographed at horse events wearing barn jackets that would not look out of place at a county fair. The properties in Virginia and Wyoming are not a marketing campaign. They are what Forrest Sr. told his kids was correct, and his kids never updated the operating system.
How invisibility compounds across generations
The Psychology Today taxonomy of American wealth culture identifies five sub-types of millionaire, ranging from the Thrillionaire who treats wealth as a passport to constant pleasure, to the Realionaire who stays under the radar and finds pride in being a smart consumer.
By that taxonomy the Mars family sits firmly in the Realionaire camp, the rare variant at billionaire scale. They spend big on the things that matter to them — the business itself, philanthropy, horses for Jacqueline — and refuse to spend on the trappings most people assume billionaires want.
The compounding effect is the part most family-business observers miss. When a founder establishes a culture of invisibility and pairs it with a profit-sharing compensation system, the heirs grow up in a household where conspicuous consumption is genuinely embarrassing rather than performatively avoided. By the third and fourth generation, the family no longer has to discipline itself. The behaviour is the default.
The succession question almost no other family solves
The most common mistake wealthy families make in passing down a business is keeping the next generation in the dark until the estate plan does the talking. Heirs then receive enormous wealth with no preparation, the way a lottery winner might.
The Mars family did the opposite. Forrest Sr. brought his children into the business as adolescents. They worked in factories. They learned the formulas. Forrest Jr. and John ran the company together for decades. Jacqueline served on the board. By the time the third generation needed to take over, every adult Mars knew what every brand cost to produce, what the margins were in each market, and which suppliers were critical.
According to research on family wealth in America, only 14 per cent of American adults have had detailed inheritance conversations with family members, and 36 per cent have never discussed inheritance at all. The Mars family is the inverse of that statistic. The business is the conversation. It has been the conversation at every dinner table in every Mars household for four generations.
The numbers the company will not confirm
Mars Inc. has never filed routine public financial statements. It was closely held throughout the 20th century, and even now the only reason a hard revenue number exists in the public record is that the 2025 bond prospectus for the Kellanova deal forced one. That prospectus disclosed $54.6 billion in 2024 net sales, up 4.6 percent from the year before, and confirmed the family paid itself $1.5 billion in dividends in 2024 — more than triple what it had distributed in either of the two prior years.
What else is known: Mars employs roughly 150,000 people across more than 80 countries. The pet care division, which includes Pedigree, Whiskas, Royal Canin, and the Banfield and VCA veterinary hospital chains, is now larger by revenue than the candy business that built the company. The 2017 acquisition of VCA for $9.1 billion was, at the time, the largest deal in Mars history. The family announced no celebratory press release. There was no founder interview. The deal closed and the company kept moving. Eight years later, when Mars announced its even larger Kellanova bid, the pattern held.
What stays the same in New Jersey
Mars moved its M&M’s production from Chicago to Newark, New Jersey in 1940. In 1958, the operation moved again, to a larger plant in Hackettstown, where it has been ever since. The Hackettstown plant has been expanded and modernised many times, but the address is the same one the company has used since the Eisenhower administration.
Local residents describe the Mars presence in the town as quiet, consistent, and uneventful. The company sponsors local events. It does not put its logo on the high school stadium. It does not name buildings after the family.
The closest thing to a public Mars monument is the M&M’s character merchandise sold at the company’s branded stores in Times Square, Las Vegas, and Orlando. Those stores generate modest revenue compared to the candy business itself. They exist because the marketing team argued for them. The family approved them. The family did not attend the openings.
Why the strategy is replicable, and almost no one copies it
Most ultra-high-net-worth advisory work is reactive, triggered by liquidity events, divorces, business sales, and inheritances.
The Mars structure eliminates almost all of those triggers. There is no liquidity event because there is no plan to sell. There is no business sale because the business is the legacy. Inheritances happen, but they happen inside a corporate structure that has been preparing for them for decades.
The result is a family that needs less ongoing wealth management than a typical family with a fraction of its assets, because the assets are not liquid, not diversified across hundreds of vehicles, and not subject to the usual cycle of buy, sell, rebalance, harvest losses, restructure.
Other families could do this. Almost none do. The reasons are partly cultural and partly mathematical. Going public unlocks liquidity that lets heirs diversify, buy houses in Aspen, fund foundations, and live the visible lives that high-net-worth taxonomies expect. Staying private means the wealth stays in the company. The company keeps growing. The heirs keep driving themselves to the same supermarkets they drove to in 1985.
The detail almost no one notices
Forrest Sr.’s aversion to celebrity extended inwards as well. There is no Mars Hall of Fame. There are no portraits of past CEOs in the lobby. Forrest Sr. did not want his own picture on the wall, and he did not want anyone else’s picture there either. The walls of the Hackettstown plant, according to former employees interviewed by Brenner, are decorated with product photography and quality-control charts. The family is not on them.
When Forrest Sr. died in 1999, he was buried at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, the city near where his father had run the original Mars candy business. The headstone gives his name and his dates. It does not mention the company. It does not mention the brands. A visitor would have no way of knowing that the man buried beneath had built the company that made the candy in their car’s cupholder — and that his three children, scattered across three quiet houses in three different states, were probably sitting down to dinner in kitchens smaller than the ones in most suburban tract houses, having a conversation about next quarter’s pet food margins. The same conversation their father started in 1947, when he sat down to write a one-page letter about mutuality of benefits, and told them never to share with anyone outside the room.