Mars, Incorporated (doing business as Mars Inc.) is an American multinational manufacturer of confectionery, pet food, and other food products and a provider of animal care services founded on June 23, 1911, headquartered in McLean, Virginia in the Washington metropolitan area, and is entirely owned by the Mars family. The company had US$45 billion in annual sales in 2022; that year Forbes ranked the company as the fourth-largest privately held company in the United States.

Mars operates in four subsidiaries around the world: Mars Wrigley Confectionery (headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, with U.S. headquarters in Hackettstown and Newark, New Jersey), Petcare (Zaventem, Belgium; Poncitlán, Jalisco, Mexico; Querétaro, Mexico), Food (Rancho Dominguez, California), and MARS Edge (Germantown, Maryland), the company's life sciences division.

Franklin Clarence Mars, whose mother taught him to hand dip candy, sold candy by age 19. He started the Mars Candy Factory on June 23, 1911, with Ethel V. Mars, his second wife, in Tacoma, Washington. This factory produced and sold fresh candy wholesale, but ultimately the venture failed because there was a better established business, Brown & Haley, also operating in Tacoma. By 1920, Mars had returned to his home state, Minnesota, where the earliest incarnation of the present day Mars company was founded that year as Mar-O-Bar Co., in Minneapolis and later incorporated there as Mars, Incorporated.

In 1923, Forrest Mars Sr., son of Frank and his first wife, Ethel G. Mars, was discussing his father's business struggles with him at a soda fountain. Inspired by his beverage, Forrest suggested that his father base a candy bar on a chocolate malted milk milkshake Frank took the suggestion and, making use of the neglected ingredient Minneapolis nougat, introduced the Milky Way bar, advertised as a "chocolate malted milk in a candy bar", which became the best-selling candy bar. In 1929, Frank moved the company to Chicago and started full production in a plant which still exists today. In 1930, Frank Mars created the Snickers bar and first sold it in US markets. In 1932, Mars introduced the 3 Musketeers bar.

In 1932, Forrest Mars was given a check by his father as well as the foreign rights to market the Milky Way. The younger Mars moved over to Great Britain and started his own company, Mars Limited, in the town of Slough. The Mars bar was launched there to great success. He continued to expand his company over the next decades.

Following the death of Frank Mars in 1934, the Mars company ownership was placed into the hands of his widow's family. Ethel V. Mars served as president, but company activities were otherwise run by her half-brother, William Kruppenbacher. In gradual phases, Forrest Mars, who ran his own Mars company in Britain, finally took control of his father's company in Chicago by 1964 and merged the two entities together into one Mars.

Mars moved its headquarters to McLean, Virginia, in 1984.

In 2001, Mars purchased the Lucas candy company. In 2004, Lucas was discontinued when high amounts of lead were found inside of their candies. ^[1]