As we recognize soldiers this Memorial Day, here are some products that sustained many who served overseas, and which were staples in stores and homes after those soldiers returned home.
National Museum of American History
Hershey bars
The Hershey Company, which produced its first chocolate bar in 1900, received a special request in 1937 from the US Army to create the “D-Ration bar.” Far from the deliciousness of a typical chocolate bar, the request from the Army was that it “taste a little better than a boiled potato” so that soldiers didn’t wolf it down too quickly. The Army also asked that the bar withstand high heat without melting, weigh only 4 ounces, and provide an energy boost, according to an account from History.com.
The company introduced a better-tasting chocolate bar in 1943 exclusively for the armed forces, the Tropical Bar, which in the words of a Hershey pamphlet at the time, was a response “to the requests of our boys for the kind of chocolate they knew at home.”
By the end of World War II in 1945, Hershey had manufactured more than 3 billion ration bars for troops.
Mars
M&Ms
Forrest Mars patented a process in 1941 of coating chocolate pellets with a candy shell to help them resist melting and began production that year in Newark, New Jersey. When the war started the next year, the heat-resistant M&Ms proved so popular with troops that they were included in their rations and were sold in stores on bases and ships.
M&Ms were made only for the armed services during the war but were reintroduced to the public in 1946, after it ended, and sold well with soldiers who “returned with a taste for the colorful candies,” according to the National Park Service.
Gillette
Gillette safety razors
King C. Gillette introduced the safety razor in 1903, and the device was sold as a safer option than the straight razor (cue the Sweeney Todd soundtrack), which required frequent sharpening with a strop and a deft hand. In World War I, when soldiers were encouraged to shave to ensure a proper seal on their gas masks, the US government issued more than 3 million safety razors to soldiers. “By the end of the war,” recounts a ThoughtCo article, “an entire nation was converted to the Gillette safety razor.”
Hormel
Spam
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Introduced by Hormel in 1937, Spam, the tinned pork product, also became a staple in soldiers’ rations and was sold at armed forces’ stores. By 1994, more than 90% of Hormel’s canned products, including Spam, were shipped for government use, and over 133 million cans of Spam products were consumed by soldiers and civilians abroad from 1940–1945, according to the company.
Spam was such a staple among soldiers during the war that it became—and remains—popular in areas where US troops had a presence.
“Wherever American GIs landed during World War II around the Pacific—Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines—they left Spam in their wake,” Gabrielle Berbey, associate producer for The Experiment podcast, told The Atlantic. “Spam took hold in those places and became a ubiquitous part of diets.”
Coca-Cola
Coke
In 1943, future US president Dwight Eisenhower, then the US Army general, sent a telegram to Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta requesting that the company build 10 portable factories overseas to supply the troops with Coke.
By the end of the war, Coke had built 64 bottling plants overseas and “transformed the experimental wartime plants into fully operational facilities,” according to the Museum of the American GI. A global brand was born.
Kimberly-Clark
Kotex
During WWI, paper products company Kimberly-Clark supplied the armed forces and Red Cross with cotton-like bandages made from wood pulp called Cellucotton. But after the war ended, the company “repurchased the government’s war-surplus Cellucotton and had to figure out what to do with it,” according to its website.
Until then, people generally had used cloth materials when menstruating, either washing or disposing of them. However, according to Smithsonian magazine, during the war, nurses in France began using Cellucotton bandages for the purpose.
Kimberly-Clark introduced Kotex, whose name derives from “cotton texture,” in 1920. “Although a woman’s article,” read an early ad for the product cited by Smithsonian magazine, “it started as Cellucotton—a wonderful sanitary absorbent which science perfected for use of our men and allied soldiers wounded in France.”