Updated M&M Inflation Index & Graph - 2025

2025 is already upon us, and it’s time to update the M&Ms Inflation Index. Like some of you, I remember when a 1.69 oz packet of M&Ms was 5 cents. Yes, that’s back in the 1950s. Today, the price of that same packet has gone up to $1.79. 

For you mathematicians, that’s a whopping 3,480%! And that means the dollar’s purchasing power has gone down in the opposite direction, maybe something approaching the same amount only in reverse.

M&Ms are made by the Mars Company. (By the way, the Mars family has quite an interesting history.) They have made it a point to offer the 1.69 oz packet since the company began to make them, come hell, high water, or monetary inflation. Of course they also understood that a variety of sizes and prices can please the public, so you find their products in a plethora of different packaging.

So for the economists among you, here below I have updated the chart for the 1.69 ounce pack:

A professional economist friend of mine, Peter Earle at AIER, explained that price inflation has certainly contributed to the uptick in our favorite snack. In this particular case, however, there is another factor: cocoa bean farmers are having terrible problems with their crops, especially in Africa where most of them are produced. 

Here’s a chart giving the price of cocoa for the last five years, from TradingEconomics.com:

The price has risen about 340%in the past year and a half – quite extraordinary, and most probably not just due to monetary inflating of the money supply.  J.P. Morgan has what I judge to be a reasonable explanation of the cocoa phenomenon. They describe the causes of the increase in the price to be mostly due to local economic, political, social, and market pressures, not linked directly to monetary inflating, other than on the retail downstream product level. One supposes that the local and international devaluation of money through monetary inflating could indeed bear some responsibility, but it's difficult to determine how much.

 We’ll just have to see, if and when the farming problems are solved, whether the price goes down. Cocoa prices have indeed subsided a bit, but on the retail M&M level will the reduction be reflected in your M&Ms? What’s your bet?

Given the market factors in the price of chocolate, our M&M Standard is perhaps imperfect. Dare I end this by stating that one of the best barometers to use in determining the loss of value of a currency is gold? Here is Kitco's gold chart showing how many dollars you get per ounce:

I also like this one from PricedinGold.com, showing how many milligrams of gold you can buy for a dollar. It really hits where it hurts. And for this you can blame the indebted-dollar farmers at the Fed and the distributors of these inflated and borrowed dollars: Congress.

Price Shock: M&Ms hit 99 cents a pack!

Doing a bit of shopping the other day, I was horrified to find my staple pack of M&Ms up to $1.29 at Office Depot. Stunned into a reality check, I decided to find out what the current supermarket price is. It's 99 cents.

Most of us look at the items we purchase regularly as an indication of how prices change. The price of M&Ms is my own personal CPI indicator. To take this particular item in a pseudo-scientific study (click on the image for a larger version):



- When I was an adolescent in the 1960s, a one-portion pack was 5 cents.

- I remember a few years later when the pack size began to vary a lot. Mars and the other candy makers started offering Jumbo Packs with twice as much for three times the price and other hoaxes like that, so they could hide the price increase.

- My next statistical indicator comes from the mid- to late-1990s when I owned a small coffee shop and market. I sold my M&Ms portion pack (who knows how many ounces by this time) for 55 cents.

- Today, ten years later, they're at 99 cents, almost double.

Something's happening.

Moving to my reliable source of price inflation information, AIER.org's Cost-of-Living calculator calculates that my 5-cent candy in 1955 should be priced at something like 41 cents today, assuming the portions are approximately the same. Of course, they may not be; but in your estimation, in which direction would the portions vary? Larger, or smaller? Well, let's not denigrate the candy companies. Let's just say that the ounces are the same.

So, I conclude that my M&Ms have increased in price at a rate of double the national average. Which brings me to the subject of the coming world food crisis.

According to Robert Zoellick, the President of the World Bank Group and the fellow I heralded for having dared to bring up the dead subject of the gold standard, the world can take many steps to "put food first." The G20 should "empower the poor" to ensure "the availability of nutritious food." In his piece in the Financial Times of January 6, 2011, world governments can and should take eight steps to achieve this goal in face of rising food prices.

The steps include improvement of weather forecasting (good luck), exempting "humanitarian food aid from export bans" (good luck), establishing "small regional humanitarian reserves in disaster-prone, infrastructure-poor areas (good luck), and helping "smallholder farmers become a bigger part of the solution to food security" (good luck).

I thought Mr. Zoellick had a grain of good common sense when I read his piece about gold's helpful role as a barometer of worldwide inflating. He is letting me down. If I read correctly from this article, he is just another bureaucrat ... but how silly of me. What was I expecting from someone at the World Bank?

Why doesn't he see that the price of sugar is not a supply problem? It is a monetary problem. If it were a supply problem it would be the only commodity with a rising price. However, as the charts reveal, all commodities are rising to record levels, with few exceptions. Take a look at this chart from Indexmundi.com.

There is no question but that the world is headed into a food price crisis. But my analysis of the problem does not point to governments or government agencies as the solution. The real long-term solution lies in finding an anchor for the world's monetary units, whether it be gold or something else.

More close to home, the question, as I have said before, is: Will this wave of commodity price increases translate into a CPI index rise in the U.S.? We have already got higher gasoline prices, and now higher M&M prices. Will it spread to everything else?

That depends on several factors: (1) the turn of U.S. political winds; (2) the health of U.S. and European banks, which in turn depends on the health of the real estate/banking sector in the U.S. and the PIIGS situation in Europe; and (3) the effect of the above on the interest rate markets, which in turn will have an effect on (2).

Some analysts expect the Fed's and other central banks' monetary actions will produce widespread price inflation worldwide. But this can happen only if the deflationary hot air can blow out of depressed economies. What if (1), (2), and (3) turn negative? And/or what if the deflationary pressures underlying our current crisis turn out to be ongoing? The Fed can "print" all it wants, but it cannot (a) force prices up, or (b) force interest rates down against the will of the gods of markets.

This is the infamous rock-and-hard-place I have mentioned in previous posts. My slow-motion movie climax is approaching. Keep your eyes open over the next few months.