M&M/Mars comes to town, 1958

Ask anyone in America what Hackettstown is famous for, and the answer comes wrapped in a candy shell.

The story starts in Newark, in wartime. Forrest Mars founded M&M Ltd there in 1940, and within a year the little candies — invented to survive a soldier’s pocket — were being made almost exclusively for the armed forces. After the war, the Newark factory ran under the name printed on every M&M’s package of the era: Hawley & Hoops, Inc. By the mid-1950s, America wanted more M&M’s than Newark could make.

The answer was a farm.

On High Street, at the edge of town, lay the Bakker farm. On August 23, 1956, the Gazette put an aerial photograph of it across the front page, mid-transformation: more than a hundred concrete footings across the fields, bulldozers — “giant cats,” the caption called them — pushing earth, power poles marching up from High Street. Walter Kidde Constructors was raising a 230,000-square-foot plant there for Hawley & Hoops, makers of M&M candies, who were moving their factory from Newark to Hackettstown. The plant was due to be finished the following summer, with room for eight hundred workers — in a town of only a few thousand. Even the water reached out to meet it: a new ten-inch line, laid that same summer by the town’s Water Board, ran alongside the construction road to the site.

Production began in 1958 — one year before Fiedler Real Estate opened its doors down the street — and the plant has been making M&M’s here ever since. The company’s presence reshaped the town: jobs, families, houses, schools — the whole geography of a growing community.

For a real estate firm founded the following year, Mars wasn’t just a neighbor. It was the engine behind a generation of the town’s growth — and behind a great many of the front doors this firm has helped open since.

The town and the candy have long since become one identity. A stretch of High Street in front of the plant now carries an honorary name, chosen by residents and Mars associates together: M&M’s Chocolate Avenue.

A small-town connection. The factory stands on land that was the Bakker family’s farm. As the Fiedlers remember it, a daughter of that family — Tina Bakker, later Tina Palko — spent more than twenty-five years at Fiedler Real Estate a few blocks away, helping run the business. In Hackettstown, the stories of farms, families, and businesses have a way of braiding together across the generations.

Have photographs of the plant’s early years, or memories of working there — or of the farm that came before it? This story will grow with them — tell us.