The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars

Book by Brenner Jol Glenn

Bar Wars

Hershey and Mars both supplied U.S. troops with candy during World War II, trumpeting their efforts in promotions on the home front.

Mars, Inc., factory outside Amsterdam, July 31, 1990, just before midnight

Theo Leenders hadn't moved from his desk all day. He just sat there, stiff and silent, his eyes riveted to the sleek black telephone in front of him as if his gaze could convince it to ring. He thought the phone call would have surely come through by now. After all, three days had passed since he left his first message for Omar Sharir, the twenty-seven-year-old manager of Mars's Middle East operations. Sharir, a marketing man and fresh recruit Leenders had sent to the region only six weeks earlier, was supposed to be living at the SAS Hotel in Kuwait City while looking for permanent housing and becoming familiar with the sales territory. But no one at the SAS had seen him for days.

Leenders had left a half-dozen messages with the hotel operator and had even sent the SAS manager to check Sharir's room, but nothing seemed out of place. Nevertheless, Leenders was worried. Sharir was green and arrogant. Born in Egypt, he spoke fluent Arabic though he had lived most of his life in London. Leenders knew Sharir was a savvy salesman, but he wasn't sure the freshman was ready for a big assignment like Kuwait, where he was to oversee and expand the company's Persian Gulf business. Forrest Mars, Sr., the now-retired patriarch of the Mars empire, seeded this territory in the late 1960s, hiring locals to distribute M&M's, Snickers bars and Uncle Ben's rice to Arab shopkeepers. Now, some twenty years after the Old Man sold his first chocolate bar in the desert, the gulf region accounted for more than $40 million in sales annually, with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia the leading markets.

Sharir's job was to keep it that way.

His first priority: to convince Kuwaiti merchants to devote precious store space to a new candy bar display, specially designed by Mars engineers. The new display case looked like any ordinary shelf unit, but it was refrigerated, allowing merchants to prominently display Mars chocolates in the heat of the day while the competition's candy stayed buried in the freezer in the back of the store--a distinct advantage for Mars. Sharir was supposed to persuade shopkeepers to make room for the new units by proving that sales of Mars products would be more profitable than sales of chips or sundries, which already crowded the shelves. Sharir was expected to report on his progress daily, but he hadn't called Leenders in Amsterdam since the previous week.

Now, at 2 a.m. local time, Leenders was giving up hope. If Sharir didn't reach him by late morning, he would have to call Mars headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and report the young man's disappearance. The thought made him cringe, like he'd eaten a piece of sour candy.

Next day, McLean headquarters, just outside Washington, D.C.

Edward J. Stegemann was worried and everybody knew it. The finesse and poise that were typical of the well-dressed corporate attorney had vanished in a frenzy of scowling and pacing and barking.

"Damn it," he yelled across the open office, his remark aimed at no one in particular and, at the same time, at everyone in the room. "Shit."

For three weeks now, Stegemann had closely monitored the growing political crisis in the Persian Gulf. On July 17, when Iraqi president Saddam Hussein gave his "Revolution Day" speech, a rousing oratory peppered with attacks on neighboring Kuwait, Stegemann received a personal translation of Hussein's fiery prose from the intelligence unit at Mars Electronics, a division of the company that, among other things, gathers information on political activities around the world that might affect Mars operations. While Hussein's verbal assault piqued Stegemann's interest, he wasn't deeply disturbed by it; Hussein was known to be a hotheaded fanatic, and Stegemann, like most of the world, had regarded the speech as bluster.

It wasn't until July 24--when two Iraqi armored divisions massed on the Kuwait border--that Stegemann became concerned enough to telephone friends at the State Department to get the inside track on the Iraqi dictator's intentions. Stegemann reminded his contacts--men he knew from his previous career as a U.S. intelligence agent--that Mars had a rapidly expanding business in the Persian Gulf. The company, he said, would do whatever was necessary to protect its investment in the region, which included two full-time Mars executives, a state-of-the-art distribution warehouse in the free port of Jebel Dhanna in the United Arab Emirates and an extensive network of local candy brokers who distributed Mars products in six gulf states.

If trouble was brewing, he told his State Department sources, he needed to know.  But Stegemann's contacts had informed him, just as the government had informed the media, that there was no cause for concern. The Iraqi president promised he would never attack Kuwait, and on July 25, Hussein had personally told the U.S. ambassador to Iraq that the border tanks were meant only to intimidate.

Based on these assurances, Stegemann had advised the owners and CEOs of Mars, Inc.--John Mars and his older brother, Forrest Mars, Jr.--to proceed with business as usual. The brothers did not order Mars personnel to leave the gulf region; just the opposite, additional Mars managers were flying to Saudi Arabia from London right now for a regularly scheduled meeting on marketing strategy for the coming fall season. The team would arrive in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, in a matter of hours, just after Stegemann received word from Leenders that Sharir was missing.

"Christ," Stegemann moaned into the telephone as he listened to Leenders's report. "This is just great."

"I'll keep trying to reach him," Leenders assured the corporate counsel in McLean. "I'll send a distributor to look for him."

"You do that," Stegemann barked. "Now!"

But less than twenty-four hours after Stegemann ordered the search for Sharir, Saddam Hussein did the unthinkable, sending his troops to invade Kuwait. Without hesitation, the United Nations Security Council and President George Bush denounced the invasion and demanded the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces. The United States froze Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets and banned all trade and financial relations with Hussein. On August 3, Iraq said it would withdraw troops from Kuwait within two days, but when the deadline came, hundreds of Westerners were detained in Kuwait City or taken to Baghdad instead. No one knew if Sharir was among them.

"We phoned and phoned, and he never returned our calls," Leenders said. "Finally, SAS International told us he was gone. He had left the hotel. We said, 'Bloody hell, where is he?' That was the hotel where all the internationals were staying . . . but he wasn't there."

Leenders called the Egyptian secret police, hoping they might help in the search as Sharir was an Egyptian citizen. He also sent telegrams directly to Baghdad demanding Iraq release all international citizens from Kuwait, which on August 8 was "annexed" by its Iraqi invaders. Leenders pleaded with the British Embassy, the American Embassy and the Egyptian Embassy for news of his missing colleague. But for four weeks, there was no word. Not a message or a rumor. Nothing.

Mike Davies couldn't imagine what had happened to Sharir, but he didn't have much time to think about it. What began for him as a regularly scheduled marketing meeting in Riyadh had turned into a nightmarish effort to save Mars's Middle East operations from collapse. All channels leading into the gulf had been blocked by the U.S. Navy; communication with anyone in Kuwait was impossible for those not in the military; journalists from around the world were swarming around the King James Hotel, where Davies and the other Mars managers were staying, making it impossible for the Mars executives to send even a simple fax to McLean because the machines were so jammed. It was a circus that threatened the entire business.

If Mars couldn't get its products into the region and distribute them as usual, the record-breaking sales year that Davies had envisioned would be lost. What's more, the company's relationships with local shopkeepers and candy brokers, carefully cultivated over decades, could be severely damaged. That would make it impossible for Davies to expand Mars sales in the future. And that could ultimately cost Davies his job.

"Saudi was fifty percent of the business; Kuwait was twenty-five percent," Davies recalled. "We had to turn the whole thing into an opportunity or else."  As Iraqi troops prepared for a showdown, marching closer and closer to the Saudi border, Davies and the rest of the London team hurriedly set up a crisis management center in a conference room of the King James. The posh, European-style hotel was quickly becoming a headquarters for every major media outlet in the world, including CNN, which was mesmerizing America with its frontline, twenty-four-hour coverage of the events unfolding in the gulf.

But the men from Mars were oblivious to all of this; their mission, as spelled out by headquarters, was to protect the Mars franchise--to sell Mars bars, Milky Ways, Starburst Fruit Chews and Uncle Ben's rice to anyone who could possibly use the products during the standoff.
In just a few days, Davies and his team plotted a new marketing campaign aimed at increasing Mars sales throughout the region. They code-named the operation "SuperSavers," and Davies personally traveled to Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE to launch the program.

"We told the trade [distributors and shopkeepers], 'We know times are tough, the future is uncertain, but our products are the market leaders in their category.  "'You know that if...