Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
79 published records
01 / belief
“A lot of times, shows, I think, have a hard time maintaining their season one into momentum into two and two into three, and there’s no problem with that here.”
02 / belief
“Kind was doing $1.5 billion in revenue, I believe, almost completely domestically in America.”
03 / uncertainty
“We don’t know the margin of the pet hospitals versus the dog food, versus the candy.”
04 / belief
“Last one. I think last year I carved out Silo. Silo season two is here on Apple TV, and it is excellent.”
05 / belief
“The other aspect about chocolate, though, and I think here is the right place to talk about it, is the industry and what chocolate is, is changing hugely.”
06 / belief
“Then the chocolate inside. They partnered with chocolatiers all over the country, I think maybe even internationally all over the world, to just highlight some of the very best talent in the chocolate-making industry globally.”
07 / belief
“I believe in 2007 they took a large stake, and then in 2015 they fully bought out PetSmart for 100% ownership.”
08 / belief
“I think for the biggest businesses in the world, it’s these businesses that operate at high gross margins in very large markets, where you basically can build out a massive fixed cost base and then have great operating leverage.”
09 / belief
“Obviously, we did not do a deep dive on the pet business, despite it being the larger business. I think, though, the main power in the pet business is switching costs.”
10 / belief
“His mother, the original Ethel, is actually still alive, and I think he spends a lot of it with her and taking care of her.”
11 / belief
“Having Buffett come in, put his stamp of approval, calm everybody down even in the midst of all the craziness with Lehman, I suspect there’s no way the deal gets done if Berkshire doesn’t get involved.”
12 / commitment
“A lot of the real, real richness and complexity that has for thousands of years made chocolate a super attractive food for humans, it’s in danger of being lost or being watered down. I will say, the industry is very focused on this.”
13 / belief
“I think the candy industry used to have cornered resources. I don’t really think it does anymore.”
14 / belief
“Maybe in smaller shops, but that’s (I think) especially with supermarkets when that changed.”
15 / belief
“I found that it was 70%, and the place that I found it was from—this is flashing forward a little bit—some 1979 consumer market research that Mars commissioned.”
16 / belief
“The really big story, though, I think of the brothers’ tenure and Jackie too as a third owner of the business, and eventually later, she does also work in the business herself, is globalization.”
17 / belief
“I was the perfect age. I think Macaulay Culkin and I are roughly the same age, give or take a year.”
18 / belief
“The management of the trust became super removed from the realities of the business and the market. I think that’s how this happened.”
19 / belief
“I think a big part of the strategy, though, like you said about distribution of pet food, in 2002, Mars had bought a French pet food company called Royal Canin, or I’ve also heard it pronounced Royal Canin.”
20 / belief
“I think as far as Mars thinking about, geez, we want some diversification hedge if people stop eating candy bars, they’re on a good trend there.”
21 / belief
“With the caveat that those companies and ones like them probably also fit this bill, I think Mars is one of the first modern companies.”
22 / belief
“I wonder, (a) if Forrest would have made a different decision, and also (b), if the brother’s would have made a different decision, had they had a little more confidence in their own security in their own places, CEOs. I think there was a timing element to this.”
23 / belief
“I think the candy industry is much like the luxury industry in that once you have an established product and product brand, it is impossible to kill it.”
24 / belief
“I believe all of which are still operating, making dark chocolate, not milk chocolate, obviously at the time.”
25 / belief
“I think that’s right. It’s super interesting how two manufacturers popped up here in San Francisco in the 1800s.”
26 / belief
“Baby Ruth candy bar named, I think, for President Grover Cleveland’s baby daughter Ruth.”
27 / commitment
“There’s a lot of legend, shall we say, about the Mars family, which we will get into as we go here.”
28 / commitment
“I will say it is pretty incredible how much from here on out, the story is a story of ad campaigns.”
29 / uncertainty
“Everybody who eats sugar today knows that if you’re eating sugar, it is triggering, I don’t know if it’s dopamine or serotonin, but there’s definitely a stimulus of a happiness release.”
30 / belief
“Actually, I think if we were to use this, we would divide our profit dollars by the value of the Acquired brand.”
31 / belief
“Even he, I think, probably would have to admit that he’s thankful that Frank does these things.”
32 / belief
“I know. But yes, I think you are right. The milk chocolate and the peanut are the sales drivers.”
33 / observation
“The second benefit is they don’t pay as many taxes since they’re reinvesting before those dollars fall all the way to the bottom line as income.”
34 / belief
“On the other hand, I suspect Forrest also had his ambitions always on coming back to America anyway, and now it seemed like a pretty good time to do it.”
35 / belief
“I suspect they turn profitable on this decision a lot faster than 10 years out, but there are obviously other reasons that Forrest is doing this too.”
36 / belief
“I bet it helped pull in the bank debt because I doubt Mars had significant banking relationships going into this, because they didn’t have any debt.”
37 / commitment
“As evidenced by the fact that, here we are today eating the most popular candies in the world that Mars makes, and it’s still Snickers, Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, M&M’s, which we will get into.”
38 / belief
“After he retired and the business passed to his sons and the next generation, I think that’s when they adapted that document into the Mars principles.”
39 / belief
“I think regardless of whether Forrest had anything to do with the Milky Way idea, launch, or anything like that, meeting his dad, seeing that there is a business in the family, starts recalibrating Forrest’s ambitions even higher than just being an engineer who can now go run a mine.”
40 / belief
“I’m just purely speculating, but I suspect profit contribution–wise, they’re at least equal, if not bigger on the candy side.”
41 / commitment
“Actually, there’s a fun story around that that we will talk about a little bit later.”
42 / belief
“I think that’s the standard decoration. Yeah, you can tell how pissed Forrest was at his dad about the Chicago factory specifically, but also just how deep seated this is.”
43 / belief
“Chocolate is remarkably hard to make. I think that is a huge takeaway. The fact that I’m looking down here at all these bags of M&M’s and the Snickers bar, we just assume, oh, this is an industrial thing that just comes off the line.”
44 / belief
“All told, all of his sets of companies, I believe here now in the mid- to late-1950s are doing $200 million-ish in revenue.”
45 / uncertainty
“In part, this is American capitalists coming into an industry. I don’t know if you know this or not, both of those families were Quakers.”
46 / evaluation
“Is it that different if left absorbs right or right absorbs left? If you’re the controlling shareholder of both, no, it doesn’t matter.”
47 / belief
“I think part of it was also a spike in strawberry prices, so they just did away with the vanilla, and now it’s just called 3 Musketeers, even though it’s only the chocolate variant.”
48 / belief
“I’m like, which one? I think there are a million of these stories. Even here, in the 30s in the UK, he basically implements the Toyota production system in the Mars factory.”
49 / commitment
“You may know that they own the world’s most popular candy, Snickers, in addition to M& M’s, or perhaps you know they’re in the pet food business. But they also own everything from Ben’s Original Rice to now Kind Bars, and they have one massive deal in the works that we will talk about later on this episode.”
50 / belief
“I don’t want listeners to get the sense that, oh, it’s just ad agencies that are doing this and it’s advertising. It really is the discipline of marketing, of which ad agencies, I think, were a lot more consultative in this function back in the day.”
51 / belief
“My second one, I think a while ago, I mentioned I got a Tesla Model Y, which is just an awesome car.”
52 / belief
“There are also, as always, a couple of versions of this story. But I think the one that is closest to the truth is that back when Forrest was in England, he had gotten to know a chemist who had invented a new method for milling rice that was called parboiling.”
53 / belief
“In many ways, it feels Bernard Arnault-esque, like, you guys, look what I learned in America.”
54 / belief
“We picked M&M’s, thinking this’ll be just some nice light hearted fare about the candies and the characters on commercials that remind us all of our childhood. But as we dug into Mars Incorporated, the parent company, we realized that the story is totally thrilling.”
55 / belief
“Probably I’m guessing, even better than the candy business, because gum, I believe, is mostly a petroleum byproduct.”
56 / belief
“I think the right way to think about Hershey at this point in time is like Amazon.”
57 / belief
“I think in any CPG business, it’s a scale economies business, but here we haven’t talked directly yet about how important shelf space is for candy.”
58 / uncertainty
“There’s a thing I want to bring up with you, and this has been a debate in the acquired Slack, I don’t know if you’ve seen it at all, around branding.”
59 / belief
“I think part of this comes from the fact that they’re just amazing at the industrialization of production.”
60 / evaluation
“In markets where it is important to be first to market, getting scale quickly so you become the product of record or of reference when people are trying to describe the category.”
61 / uncertainty
“Why did the Chappel Brothers start making pet food? I don’t know. There is as little information as there is about the company and the family.”
62 / belief
“Charter an airplane and just drop it. I think we would get in a lot of trouble if we did that these days.”
63 / belief
“Totally. This is one of many mind-blowing things in the research that I learned.”
64 / belief
“What makes it so effective, I think, is that it just so gets at the very core of the psychology of being a parent of candy-age-eating-children.”
65 / uncertainty
“There are two versions of the story, and we don’t know which one is true. Either way, David, it leads to this thing that you’re talking about, which is there’s a little bit of a funk or a little bit of a sourness in Hershey’s chocolate.”
66 / commitment
“I just want to let you know that we are going to start phasing out our chocolate purchases from you all.”
67 / commitment
“Forrest totally recognizes all this like, we need to invest, pedal to the metal. We are going to use everything happening here to blow away our competition.”
68 / belief
“By 1929, which I think is the first year that the factory is up and running, they’re producing 20 million Milky Way bars annually.”
69 / belief
“Forrest, as he’s heading back to the US, thinks, I think there might be some global appeal here in this dragée product.”
70 / prediction
“I think the thought process probably was, okay, consumers are going to be outraged when we double the price of the bar after 70 years.”
71 / prediction
“I could make that a lot cheaper because the other ingredients, whether it’s nuts, nougat, sugar, or whatever, are cheaper.”
72 / preference
“I might not even be able to finish a whole Snickers bar just because it’s so sugary, but, oh, my God, is that first bite good.”
73 / evaluation
“In fact, there’s a story about how the first plant that Hershey expands to, their first second plant outside of Hershey, Pennsylvania, they can’t get it to work. They can’t get the chocolates to taste the same because they don’t exactly know how they get that specific sour note in the taste.”
74 / evaluation
“Whatever this is valued at on our balance sheet, whatever it cost us to build this factory 10 years ago doesn’t matter.”
75 / evaluation
“I thought this was a recent diversification hedge, but here it is effectively at the founding of Mars or at least Forrest’s modern Mars, and he’s in the first second year of business buying and diversifying to pet food. It was immediately a good idea because it became profitable after just a couple of years, and started generating enough cash flow to fund the expansion of Mars bars.”
76 / evaluation
“He starts writing memos to the board about everything that is wrong at the company, All the big mistakes that William is making as CEO, and why William should be fired and Forrest should take over.”
77 / preference
“There are a couple things about chocolate that I want to talk about that are more general than specific to Mars. One is just that chocolate, I’m biased here because I love chocolate.”
78 / recommendation
“We just had one of my favorite conversations ever on the show, in part because I just love talking computer architecture, with Rene Haas, who is the CEO of Arm Holdings, the chip design company that makes the designs and the instruction set architecture of everything inside your smartphone, your car, your laptop, and now even massively in the data centers.”
79 / evaluation
“I probably ate more than a recommended amount because we’ve been sitting here for 5½ hours doing this.”