When
I was six-years-old, we took a family vacation to Washington, D.C. and went on a
tour of the White House. I remember very little about the tour, but the one
thing that has always stuck with me is that at the end, right before we left,
our tour guide gave each person a saxophone lapel pin these were the Clinton
years, and he's a mean sax player and a box of presidential M&Ms. The box was
stamped with the presidential seal and Bill Clinton's signature and inside,
there were red, white, and blue M&Ms. Almost two decades later, that tradition
is apparently still very much alive, and according
to a recent article from Thrillist, M&M were actually the official White
House candy long before Clinton's administration.
You may have heard that Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States,
loved his candy. While his
all-time favorite was Jelly Belly jelly beans Thrillist reports that he
asked for 3.5 tons of the candy to be stocked in the White House Reagan
started to favor M&Ms as the official White House candy during his eighth and
final year in office. Before Reagan's presidency, Air Force One and the White
House were not stocked with candy. Instead, you'd find packs of presidential
cigarettes and matchbooks in every corner. Thank goodness they switched over
because I would have been a very disappointed six-year-old if I had been given a
pack of cigarettes upon finishing my White House tour though, at least I would
have still had that rad sax pin.
President Reagan reached out to Mars in 1988 to ask for custom presidential
boxes of M&Ms in anticipation of four-day Moscow Summit, and Mars happily
obliged. Thrillist wrote that this candy choice was appropriate for many
reasons; "During Reagan's era, M&M's were also the No. 1 leading candy brand in
the country (and still are today). The candy choice is also a very patriotic
one: M&M's were invented during World War II for soldiers."
From then on, every other POTUS has followed Reagan's lead. Seeing as we swore
in a new president today, you may be wondering what will happen to this M&M
obsession now that Trump is in office. Matt Costello, senior historian for the
White House Historical Association, told Thrillist it's not likely the new
administration would give up the M&Ms. Of course, on the list of things we're
currently concerned about, no longer having M&Ms as the official candy of the
White House is pretty low on the list.
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