How Mars Chocolate created the first-ever soft center caramel M&M

Mars Chocolate North America is proud and excited to announce our newest product: M&M'S Caramel.

From an innovation standpoint, this is the largest investment the M&M'S® brand has ever made in a new product launch. Creating M&M’S Caramel took a focused research and development effort that led to us perfecting the methodology to produce the soft center. This has been one of the largest technical endeavors for Mars to date.

As the 75th anniversary for M&M’S comes to an end this year, we are excited to expand our M&M’S line-up and look towards the future with the launch of M&M’S Caramel, which will be available to purchase in stores as soon as April 2017.

Why Caramel?

Early in the product development process the team at the Mars Chocolate North America identified caramel as one of the fastest-growing flavor segments. In 2015 alone, it grew more than 15 percent among consumers, despite already being a $2.2B flavor segment within confectionery. A perfect segment for the world’s favorite chocolate brand to play in.

Since chocolate and caramel is a popular flavor combination among consumers, and caramel is a familiar and nostalgic flavor to many, we knew we wanted to create the ultimate combination of flavors in our world-famous colorful candy shell.

The challenge was making sure we could get a sweet and chewy caramel into our famous M&M lentil (yes, that’s what we call one M&M!).

Bringing Caramel to Life

While M&M’S are known for their colorful candy shell and unique flavor combinations, none of our popular product innovations such as M&M’s Peanut, Pretzel or Crispy have included a soft center before. The R&D team at Mars Chocolate worked tirelessly to find the right recipe and manufacturing capability to create M&M’s Caramel at a large scale.

M&M’s Caramel will be the brand’s first foray into the soft and chewy category, and will be manufactured with proprietary technology at our newest factory in Topeka, Kansas. Over the last year, Mars has invested $100 million in this site, and hired more than 70 associates to support the national launch of M&M’s Caramel.

Making this product wasn’t easy, but neither was making the original M&M – and we are always ensuring each bite has the same quality as it did 75 years ago. Ever since the first M&M’S were produced in Newark, New Jersey in 1941 as military rations during World War II, they have grown to be the #1 chocolate brand in the world. After many hours of hard work, we are beyond pleased with the result of M&M’S Caramel, and can’t wait to share our newest treat with consumers around the country in the many years to come.