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M&Ms: Myths, Marketing, and Red Dye No. 2

Wherever fine candies are sold across Europe and Canada, you can easily find little drops of chocolate coated with brightly colored candy shells, produced in eight different colors, that were introduced by the British H. I. Rowntree Company in 1937.  These popular candies are called Smarties, and are made by the Swiss food conglomerate Nestlé today.   You can’t find Smarties in the United States—not the chocolate kind, anyway.   The Smarties found in America are small tablet candies produced in New Jersey by the Smarties Candy Company.  (They’re called Rockets in Canada, to make sure you don’t confuse them with the chocolate candies.) If you want something like Smarties in the United States, you have to seek out M&Ms, which have been manufactured by Mars Incorporated since 1941, launched that year as a shameless ripoff of the British confection.  M&Ms only had five colors: red, yellow, green, violet, and brown.   M&Ms were one of Mars’s most successful candies right fr