Harry: From calorie count to portion sizes,
we wanted to find out all the differences
between M&M's in the UK and the US.
This is "Food Wars."
Here in the US, we have eight
different portion sizes of M&M's.
All the way at the end here,
the smallest portion is known as the fun size.
This little guy is 0.6 ounces, or 18 grams.
Then, single size bag, 1.69 ounces.
Then we go up to the box.
This is 3.1 ounces, or 87 grams.
Now we have the share size.
Peanut makes its first appearance.
This is 3.27 ounces, or 92.7 grams.
Little bigger of a pouch,
we have the 10.7-ounce, or 303-gram,
sharing-size pouch part two.
Then we jump up to the family size.
This is 19.2 ounces, 545 grams.
Throwing a party? M&M's got you covered.
This is the party pack.
38 ounces, 1,105 grams.
And the biggest portion size you can get is this,
the pantry-size tub.
62 ounces, 1,757 grams.
In the UK, M&M's come in four standard portion sizes.
Around the holidays, you can get a selection box
with a small packet of M&M's that weighs 45 grams,
but unfortunately, we couldn't get one today.
Our standard pouch is 125 grams.
Then we move up to a more-to-share bag,
which, for standard chocolate M&M's, comes with 250 grams.
The largest size available in the UK is a party bag.
I went to about eight different supermarkets
and I couldn't find one,
but usually they would contain 1 kilogram of M&M's,
so we're going to make our own.
There is our unofficial party-size bag.
1 kilogram of M&M's.
All said, America's largest size
is 75.7% larger than the UK's.
In the UK, the portion sizes also vary slightly
depending on which flavor of M&M's you've opted for.
A more-to-share bag of chocolate M&M's is 250 grams,
but a more-to-share bag of crispy M&M's is just 246 grams.
If you want the most value in the UK,
opt for peanut M&M's.
A more-to-share bag of those contains 268 grams.
Are the M&M's themselves different sizes
in the UK and the US?
We're going to weigh out 100 grams of chocolate M&M's
and count them to see how many you get.
One, two, three ...
Two, three, four, five ...
[fast-forwarding]
That is so annoying!
It was so close to being 100 grams
of exactly 100 M&M's,
but instead 100 grams of UK chocolate M&M's
is 102 M&M's.
100 grams of American M&M's
is 114 M&M's.
So what does that mean, ours are smaller?
And how do we feel about that?
I don't know if it's better or worse.
But portion size don't stop there.
You can also buy M&M's directly from the M&M website.
The main purpose of this seems to be
catering for large events like weddings or parties.
You can technically get smaller-than-average portion sizes,
but only in bulk quantities.
For example, in the US, you can get these.
Tiny party-favor packs of M&M's
weighing just 0.75 ounces each.
Or they have party-favor tins,
which contain 1.5 ounces of M&M's.
But both of these have to have a minimum
of 20 or more units.
Now, what doesn't require a minimum order,
however, are the bulk bags.
In the US you can order bulk bags
of 1 pound, 2 pounds, or 5 pounds.
Now, technically, you could order 10 pounds of M&M's,
but they just send you two 5-pound bags,
which is a bit disappointing, so we just got one.
5-pounder.
Look at these M&M's.
The UK website is a similar situation.
Our smallest portion size is this 28-gram designer case.
But the minimum order for these is 20.
Unlike the US, we only have one bulk-bag order.
And that's this one, which is 1.5 kilograms.
That's around 3.3 pounds, which is a 34% decrease
from the largest single bag size in the US.
If you do order M&M's on the website,
you can customize them.
We chose some custom colors
and also put some custom text on the M&M's.
In terms of colors, I went for this
lovely blue-and-white color scheme
to match my stunning M&M's T-shirt.
Then I had some fun putting some text options on there.
Firstly, I went for "Harry <3 Joe."
We also had to rep the show,
so I put a "Food Wars" one on there.
Then, because I have the mind of a child,
I tried to put some swear words on the M&M's,
and it turns out they actually try and censor you.
For example, if you try and put the word "poop" on an M&M,
a warning message will flash up
telling you to get in touch with the team.
But there is a work-around.
For example, for the word "poop,"
by replacing the O's with 0s,
I was able to get around the censorship
and create poop M&M's.
The same goes for replacing the I with a 1 in "penis"
and replacing the A with a 4 in "balls."
This is some serious journalism taking place right here.
Now, Harry, of course, went with customizing M&M's
with fun words and stuff on it.
I just went for pictures.
You can get custom images on an M&M.
So what I did is I got
Harry face and Joe face M&M's.
OK, that'll show 'em.
Here are all the ingredients in chocolate M&M's in the UK.
And here is everything in a bag
of classic M&M's in the US.
Look at all those colors.
A few things to note here.
Firstly, the food colorings used
in the two countries are wildly different.
In the UK, some of our colors are natural,
including the curcumin and the carotenes.
Whereas in the US, all our colors are artificial.
Blue No. 1 is used in both the US and the UK,
but we also have Blue No. 2, Red 40,
Yellow 5, and Yellow 6.
Blue 2 is a less common one.
It's also known as indigo carmine.
Now, the good news is it won't make your kids hyperactive.
The more interesting news is that Blue 2
is filtered rapidly through the kidneys,
and consuming enough of it will turn your pee blue.
The practical use of this is so doctors
can highlight your urinary tract for surgeries.
A less practical effect or use is to freak out your friends.
Hey-o, we're doing jokes in the script, apparently.
Hey, welcome to "Food Wars"!
So anyway, turns your piss blue.
Speaking of carmine,
what about the carmine used in British M&M's?
Standard carmine is a red food coloring
with the code names Red 4 or E120.
It's a natural food dye,
but what is the natural source, you ask?
It's cochineal beetles.
If you grind up cochineal beetles,
you're left with a red powder,
which when mixed with water and some chemicals
can be turned into a very stable dye.
Obviously, we're going to now have to try and make our own.
But you can see the red color coming off of it already.
Now I'm going to try and put some of this in there,
mix it with some water, and see what happens.
That has really worked. Wow.
Look how red that is! That's incredible.
As you can see, just by chopping up some beetles
and mixing it with water, we've got this incredible
kind of blood-red food dye.
Now, while apparently synthetic alternatives
to carmine do exist, M&M's confirmed to us
that the carmine they use does in fact come from beetles.
So, technically, every time you eat a red M&M in the UK,
you're eating bugs.
So, do you want your kids hyperactive,
or do you want them eating beetles?
Not much of a choice, is it?
Here are all the M&M's products you'll find in the UK
that you won't find in the US.
These are the M&M products you'll find in the US
that you will not find in the UK.
I'm so excited for this, Yuelei. You have no idea.
Oh, my God, I'm want to try every single one of these.
And I'm going to right now.
All right, first up, peanut butter M&M's.
Love peanut butter M&M's.
Fudge brownie.
They're like the size of peanut M&M's,
but it's all chocolate inside.
I'm having a hard time deciding the difference
between the fudge brownie and regular chocolate.
Pretzel M&M's are my favorite M&M's.
These might be the best ones.
Every time M&M comes out with a new core,
it's always like, oh, who cares?
Pretzels, peanut butter, crispy.
And they're always amazing!
Mm.
Caramel M&M's.
Mm.
A more manageable Rolo. These are great.
Almond. He's a new guy.
These are really good.
Dark chocolate M&M's.
Not a big dark chocolate guy.
A little more bitter than the regular ones,
but they're still coated in candy.
Coffee nut. Oh, they're big.
Oh, and they're kind of, like,
the many shades of coffee-colored.
Oh, I don't know about these.
The only good coffee-flavored thing is coffee.
Everything else is like, don't bother.
First miss.
Mint dark chocolate.
Smells a little bit like toothpaste.
Ooh. It's like, yeah, it's got a nice refreshing ...
this could replace brushing your teeth in the morning.
Eat a couple of these.
White chocolate peanuts.
Yeah, dude, yeah.
Like the peanut ones but a little bit sweeter.
And, surprised this one is not in the UK.
It is English toffee peanut.
No.
One variety, mega peanut,
is also available here in the US and not in the UK,
but at the time of filming this,
I was not able to get my hands on it.
From what I understand,
it's like the peanut's really big.
Now, we don't have any major exclusive flavors in the UK,
but we do have some linguistic differences.
For example, while the US has caramel,
we have salted caramel.
And while the US has fudge brownie,
we have chocolate brownie.
I want to see if you can actually taste the salt
in the salted caramel.
You actually can.
Now, I am a sucker for salted caramel,
but these are really good.
We also have a bunch of seasonal M&M's in the US.
These include Christmas options,
such as sugar cookie M&M.
What is up?
Oh, yeah.
Those are good.
Mint Christmas.
Do M&M's go bad? Christmas was, like, two months ago.
Yeah. Ooh, yeah.
Bro. White chocolate pretzel snowballs.
I think we had these for the Christmas episode. I forget.
White chocolate.
The pretzel gives it that little bit of salt.
These are really good.
We also have Valentine's Day options.
This is a Cupid mix,
and it looks like the only difference
is that the M has a heart over it,
like there's a different printing on it.
I mean, it's fun to have themed candy,
but it's not a fun flavor.
I may have spoke too soon,
'cause we also have the Valentine's Day
Black Forest cake mix.
No, ugh.
There's also a dark chocolate Cupid mix
we could not get at time of filming.
Then we have some products which aren't classic M&M's
but use the M&M's branding.
The main event here is probably this.
This is an M&M's chocolate ball-pool party cake.
It says it serves 26.
I'm really struggling to see
how you'd even cut that into 26 pieces,
let alone have slices which would then satisfy people.
He's smiling, but he looks like he's kind of
smiling through the pain at the moment.
I feel you, buddy.
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
Oh, God.
[laughs]
There we go.
Can you eat him, or is he plastic?
Let's find out.
I would assume edible.
He's edible. I'm not sure what he's made of.
He does not taste good.
OK, I'm cutting myself a little piece.
It's actually really not terrible.
If I were 8 years old again
and someone gave me a piece of this at a birthday party,
I wouldn't complain.
Following on from the cake,
we've got a few more exclusive M&M's products in the UK,
starting with these chocolate bars.
You guys can get these in the US as well.
I think we share the peanut and the milk chocolate options,
but we have crispy as an exclusive
and cookie as an exclusive.
They're basically just milk chocolate bars
with little pieces of crispy M&M's or cookies inside.
Correct, we do have the chocolate bars
here in the US as well.
But one exclusive we have is this,
the almond M&M's chocolate bar.
Next up we have this M&M's spread with crispy pieces.
Now, it's a chocolate- and hazelnut-flavored spread
with crispy M&M's inside.
So it's basically like a Nutella and M&M hybrid.
Well, yeah, I'm actually pretty impressed by this.
It tastes basically the same as Nutella.
I don't know if they're actual M&M's
or just kind of the crispy rice pieces inside this,
but either way, adds a nice little crunch,
you know, a bit of texture.
Next up, we have these M&M's double chocolate cookies.
Now, the double chocolate in the name
comes from the fact that they are chocolate cookies
and then they also contain chocolate M&M's.
You know, as far as a crunchy UK cookie goes, not too bad.
Next up, we've got two Easter egg options.
It's a sort of hollow chocolate egg,
usually comes with a couple of bags of sweets
of your choosing, in this case, M&M's.
They're given to kids around Easter time
to celebrate the holiday.
Now, for M&M's, these are available
as either brownie or crispy options.
I actually don't know if Americans do Easter eggs.
Joe, is that a thing in the States?
Easter eggs, Easter candy, Easter chocolate,
Easter baskets, Easter bunny,
all that stuff is very popular in America as well.
We can also get a bunch of nonstandard
M&M's stuff here in the US.
For instance, we have M&M cookie ice cream sandwiches.
Weird, these boxes are open. That's so weird.
It says four, but there's only two in here.
I don't know what happened.
You can get them in mint, classic chocolate,
and vanilla.
There's also a chocolate one
with ice cream that's also chocolate.
That is not available in my area.
See that? And then they got the ice cream right there.
We also have something called
the Valentine's Day M&M popcorn bucket.
One, two, three packets of popcorn,
two boxes,
one of the milk chocolate and one of the peanut.
Also something that I got similar to this,
and I think it's an exclusive,
it is milk chocolate popcorn-flavored M&M's.
It's weird. Tastes like popcorn and chocolate.
Now, in preparation for this episode,
I did something which no true Londoner
should ever have to do,
which is visit M&M's World in Leicester Square.
Now, according to signs in the shop,
it's the largest candy shop in Europe
and also has the world's largest candy wall.
I'm gonna be honest, I absolutely hate M&M's World
and pretty much everything it stands for.
It's kind of like walking into the museum of capitalism.
It's somehow an even bigger tourist trap
than, like, Buckingham Palace.
I just don't understand why people would come to London
and make a beeline for the M&M's store.
So, I've not been to the M&M's store in London,
but I've definitely been to the one
in New York City, in Times Square.
And I mean this as sincerely as possible,
it's awesome.
I'd never been in before,
and I wasn't really sure what to expect.
And I was disappointed, honestly.
I was expecting at least
some kind of innovative M&M flavors,
but it was just the same flavors
that you can normally buy in the store.
It's just kind of different colors and different packaging.
The bulk of what they had on offer in the store
is actually M&M's merch,
like the grotesque shirt that I'm wearing now,
ironically, for the record.
I'm just so confused as to who would spend
their own money on this sort of stuff.
Like, why are you loving M&M's so much
that you're going to pay a brand
to let you advertise for them?
Harry, you are.
You know what isn't ironic?
How much they made on that shirt sale.
This is what we do. We like things.
We wear it to show people, look at the thing I like.
It's a capitalistic world
and I'm a cog in the machine, fine.
I can't escape, so I might as well be comfortable.
And that is my input on the matrix.
Don't unplug me, I'm happy!
All that said, I did find one or two M&M's products
which I couldn't find anywhere else.
Firstly, there was one of the M&M chocolate bars
with a flavor I couldn't see anywhere else,
and that's hazelnut.
Then there were these two sachets of powder.
Firstly, there is a cookie mix.
Apparently you add some butter and some water to this,
and then you have some ready-to-bake M&M cookies.
And then, finally, we have an M&M's hot chocolate powder.
You know what this means:
We have to summon the mug.
It's the return of Buchi and Wumi. Cheers, guys.
Oh, it's got M&M's in it. Whoa.
No, that's fine. It's better than the Oreo one.
The bar was admittedly really low,
but given the option, I would, of course,
make this with milk instead of hot water,
and I think if you did that,
it would actually be pretty good.
Carrying on from the earlier discussion
about the M&M's stores,
I do just want to quickly call out M&M's
for having some really questionable branding.
A big recurring theme is that the M&M's
are really sexualized in all of the marketing materials.
There was that TV ad where the M&M
was kind of in bed with that guy's wife.
I feel like the green M&M gets sexualized quite a lot.
And also, if you go on the official M&M's website,
they have some really questionable bios.
For example, if you go on the bio of the brown M&M,
you'll see that she has a turn-on listed, which is power.
Her appearance is described as "sexy, sophisticated,"
and her best attribute is her "big, beautiful brain."
As part of my M&M's World visit, I did a scan,
which told me which M&M I was, and I got yellow.
So let's take a look at his bio.
So, apparently my likes are pretty ladies and fluffy things.
My appearance is plump, yellow, and all smiles,
which, yeah, kind of accurate.
Although the bad news is I might be an incel,
because my shortcomings are that nice guys finish last.
The idea of giving these guys personalities
to begin with is like, Jesus Christ,
can't I just eat my candy in peace?
[rewinding]
In an unbelievable turn of events,
the very day after we filmed most of this episode,
M&M's announced that they would be rebranding their M&M's
to be more representative of the consumer.
They've backtracked on a lot
of the sexualization of the M&M's.
For example, the green M&M has swapped out
her high heels for sneakers,
and the brown M&M has had the turn-ons
removed from her bio on the website.
This whole thing prompted
an explosion of memes on the internet.
Someone went to journalism school
to write some of these headlines, and I respect them for it.
I don't know why anyone ...
if you had an opinion on this, for or against it,
you have entirely too much time on your hands.
It's also worth pointing out that someone suggested
the M&M's rebrand could be suspiciously timed
and that they might be trying to draw attention
away from an ongoing class action lawsuit.
Mars, the owner of M&M's,
along with several other major chocolate producers
including Hershey's, Nestlé, and more,
have been accused of using cocoa
from plantations which use child slave laborers.
Oh, God.
Mars told Bloomberg, "We do not comment
on any possible pending litigation."
Oh, that's ...
the fact that it wasn't a blanket,
"Of course not, what?"
The fact that they're like, "Oh, we can't comment on it,"
it's like, that's a yes.
The lawsuit is still ongoing,
so we'll have to wait and see if any more details emerge.
Was the timing of the rebrand coincidental or cynical?
We'll let you guys decide.
I like how I just found out about that
after I ate all these M&M's.
Well, if it will make everyone feel better,
I have a huge headache from eating all this junk food.
In the US, the recommended serving size of M&M's
is 28 grams, which is roughly 1 ounce.
So when it comes to classic M&M's,
the US version has more calories,
saturated fat, carbs, and sodium.
The UK M&M's actually contain more total fat
as well as more sugar.
Sugar is the worst nutritional offender
as far as M&M are concerned.
28 grams of UK M&M's contains just over a third
of your daily sugar allowance.
What about the least healthiest M&M in the US?
Well, for us, there's a two-way tie
between the peanut butter and the white chocolate peanut.
Both of these contain 150 calories per 28 grams
as well as 8 grams of fat.
In the UK, our least healthy M&M is peanut.
A 28-gram serving of UK peanut M&M's
will contain 144 calories
as well as a slightly increased 7.28 grams of total fat.
I put my body on the line for content.
I have no idea if that was fact-checked or not,
but like everyone else, I read something on the internet,
it sounds true, that's good enough for me.