Your teeth shatter through the candy shell first, then hit the chocolate membrane next. For the next few moments, it’s any M&M you’ve ever eaten. That is, until the melt-in-your-mouth coating dissolves and the caramel hits your tongue. I expect an explosion like a sundae topping. Instead, it’s chewy, but doesn’t threaten to pull out a filling. Sweet (too sweet, IMO), but it warms with maillard reaction at the last second, and it finishes with a slight kick of salt–just enough to make you consider eating one more.
I’m munching on a bag of the new Caramel M&M’S, Mars Chocolate’s latest flavor of its iconic treat. In the era of iPhones, it’s easy to forget the scale of Big Candy. Mars produces 400 million M&M’S per day, which makes for a significant (but undisclosed–Mars is privately owned) part of the company’s $33 billion of revenue a year.
According to Izzo, Mars looks to its consumers for the next big idea, and consumers had been asking for caramel M&M’S for a long time. “We would dabble here and there,” he says. “For the last several years we’ve been dabbling, prototyping, and testing with consumers. It was clear there was a lot of work we had to do, not only on what this thing was, but also how to make this thing.”
Three years ago, full development began in earnest. The team started by figuring out the composition of a caramel M&M. Of course that sounds simple–it’s an M&M with caramel in the middle!–but within those confines, there are a lot of decisions to be made. The only standard Mars has for M&M’S is that the shell and chocolate layers be consistent across all flavors. Everything else had to be figured out.
Once the R&D team had homed in on the most scientifically delicious M&M–again, too sweet to my taste buds, but what do I know?–they had to build the production workflow on an assembly line in what Izzo calls “one of the most complex product and process challenges our scientists and engineers have ever faced.”
Even in the finished pack, you can see the difficulty of the assembly with your naked eye: The Caramel M&M’S aren’t perfect little UFOs, like the classic flavor, or charming, rounded eggs like Peanut M&M’S. They’re downright craggy pebbles of varying size and shape, lacking any discernible uniformity beyond color and the perfect, printed “m” logo. They look less like something off an assembly line and more like an M&M your obsessive molecular gastronomy friend may have cobbled together by hand in his kitchen.
But Izzo is quick to argue that this imperfection is not a flaw, but a selling point: “The fact that they may not all be the exact same size and shape adds to the unique experience they deliver,” he says.