Finding M&M’s Limited Edition Packaging Supporting Women that are Flipping the Status Quo
There is an M&M’s store in Times Square, and I cross it often. It opens early and is open late, and I always see a steady stream of people crossing through its doors. As much as I like chocolate, M&M’s have never been my go to candy of choice, and so I have many pictures of their store and ads from the outside, but I never actually stepped inside their flagship store. That is, until this week.
M&M’s Flip the Status Quo Branded Packages
My change of interest was prompted by their recent marketing campaign that is supporting women to ‘Flip The Status Quo’ featuring their three female candy characters. As the M&M’s website describes, “$1 from each flipped pack will go to support the next generation of women flipping the script in creative industries”. Their website has the ability to nominate women that are flipping the status quo to be featured by M&M’s and for a chance to win $10,000 to continue their journey. The reason this initiative caught my attention is the interest it has garnered from many quarters, not for the fact that it is supporting women, but in fact mainsteam news outlets that are outraged by the all female “woke M&M’s”, going as far as calling the purple M&M’s obese! So I started going down a rabbithole to see these packages for myself, leading me to finally cross over into the flagship M&M store.
M&M’s Store in Times Square
The M&M’s store from the inside was colorful and New York themed, with a lot of opportunities for spending money. Surprisingly, and I was not in the know about this, the M&M characters are all very sassy and funny! Even more surprisingly, the employees I spoke to about finding the new Flipping the Status Quo packaging supporting women had no idea about it, and told me that the purple M&M’s are so new that they are not even expecting them in the store till March. Nonetheless I decided to make the most of my visit to the store, lack of the limited packaging M&M’s that I was looking for notwithstanding.
There were plenty of instagrammable characters inside the store, including an M&M Statue of Liberty –
The New York branding is omnipresent, ranging from walls to candy to clothes, including for babies and pets.
And then of course there are the sassy M&M characters –
The store has a lot of personalization options, ranging from making your own personalized M&M’s, or making packages from the biggest chocolate wall in NYC.
Even the escalator is all about the M&M’s!
And the entire store is one large pop of color everywhere you look.
So, at the end of this, I did get to experience the M&M’s store, and – gasp – even stepped into the neighboring Hershey store, but still had not found the “Woke M&M’s” that were causing a stir. So I started walking into every CVS or Duane Reade (still can’t call them Walgreens), and could not find the new packaging. I started checking online, and thankfully managed to find some, but my options were to have them delivered next week. I could not wait that long as finding these M&M’s had become an itch I had to scratch, and my only option was a Target on the Upper East Side that had the peanut version available for pick up. I actually set my alarm for earlier than usual so I could pick them up before work today, and here they are, flipping the status quo and shattering the glass ceiling, one M&M at a time. I like their packaging with the female characters quite literally upside down to drive home the point about flipping the status quo.
What is really ironical is that in looking for my pictures of the M&M’s store, I actually found some that I had taken this summer with an upside down walk signal outside the store. It actually looks like Times Square had flipped the status quo on the M&M’s store in this one, with the M&M’s candy characters looking on in puzzlement at the broken signal –
At the end of it all, as much as this is a marketing campaign that is garnering attention for all the wrong reasons, I for one am going to add M&M’s to the list of candies I indulge in. Mission successful.
As an update on 23rd January, 2023, I was saddened to read that M&M’s has decided to take an “indefinite pause” from its ‘spokescandies’ given the polarizing effect they are having, and replacing them with Maya Rudolph as their spokesperson! It is hard to understand given this is candy we are talking about, but here’s to hoping Maya Rudolph will keep their sassy characters going in some way.
I guess #flippingthestatusquo will need to wait a little while.
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