How M&M’s Found Itself in the Culture Wars (Published 2023) (2024)

M&M’s, the ubiquitous candy brand owned by Mars Wrigley, announced on Monday that it would take “an indefinite pause” from its “spokescandies,” deciding that the cartoon characters with arms, legs and minimal facial features were simply too divisive for a polarized America to take.

The characters, which have featured in the company’s ads for decades, were not weighing in on abortion or the storage of classified documents. But figures on the political right, including Tucker Carlson of Fox News, have criticized the candy as “Woke M&M’s,” owing to a series of cosmetic tweaks in recent years.

Here’s how we got here, to the extent that it’s possible to explain.

How Mars Wrigley explained its decision.

In a statement on Monday, Mars Wrigley began with words familiar to anyone about to have a breakup conversation: “America, let’s talk.”

“In the last year, we’ve made some changes to our beloved spokescandies,” the company said. “We weren’t sure if anyone would even notice.”

Most people hadn’t.

“We definitely didn’t think it would break the internet,” the company said. Few people thought that it had.

“But now we get it — even a candy’s shoes can be polarizing,” the company continued, surely confusing many people who had no idea what this sentence could possibly mean. We’ll come back to that.