Mars Unveils $250 Million Fund to Back Breakthroughs in Sustainable Innovation

Mars has just announced a significant move to ramp up its sustainability efforts. The company is committing up to $250 million through its newly launched Mars Sustainability Investment Fund (MSIF), which will target innovation in three key areas: agriculture, packaging, and ingredients and raw materials. The aim? To help the business hit its ambitious environmental goals while reshaping the way consumer goods are made and delivered.

When it comes to agriculture, MSIF will support technologies that can help reduce emissions linked to farming inputs, such as fertilisers and animal feed. This is a significant issue, as purchased goods and services currently account for more than 70 per cent of Mars’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture alone is a major contributor.

Beyond farming, the fund will also support the development of new ingredients and raw materials, particularly those offering low-carbon alternatives and enhanced nutritional value. In packaging, the focus will be on scalable solutions that replace flexible plastic with recyclable or compostable alternatives.

Mars states that more than 60 percent of its consumer-facing packaging is now designed to be either compostable, recyclable, or reusable. That progress includes phasing out certain plastics, shifting to single-material packaging, and increasing the use of paper and cardboard.

Still, flexible plastic remains a stubborn challenge. It’s more challenging to recycle than rigid plastic, and most current recycling systems aren't designed to handle it efficiently. On top of that, because many recycling schemes prioritise materials that are heavier and more profitable, like PET bottles, flexible plastic often gets left behind.

Mars, like many large companies in the consumer goods space, had hoped to make all of its consumer packaging recyclable, reusable, or compostable by the end of 2025. But due to broader industry struggles and delays in scaling up recycling infrastructure, that target may now be extended to 2030 under the US Plastics Pact.

The MSIF announcement was part of Mars’s latest Sustainable in a Generation report, which outlines the company's progress on its environmental goals. In 2024, Mars reported a 16.4 percent reduction in its total greenhouse gas emissions compared to its 2015 baseline. That’s up from a 14.5 per cent reduction in 2023.

What’s remarkable is that Mars has made these cuts while experiencing significant growth. Its annual net sales have increased by 69 percent since 2015. The company first managed to decouple emissions from growth in 2019, and it has continued on that trajectory.

Mars is targeting a 50 percent reduction in net emissions by 2030 and aims to achieve an 80 percent cut by 2050. At that point, it plans to achieve net zero by offsetting the remaining emissions with high-quality carbon credits.

Much of the progress made in the past year came from building strong partnerships in agriculture. Mars is now involved in over 60 climate-smart agriculture projects across 29 countries and 13 different crops.

Another major shift? The company expanded its workforce with performance-based incentives tied to reductions in emissions. That group grew from 400 in 2023 to about 2,000 in 2024.

With roughly 96 percent of Mars’s carbon footprint coming from indirect Scope 3 sources, such as supply chain emissions, the company's strategy is increasingly focused on collaboration and systemic change beyond its walls.

“We’re firmly committed not just to targets in a distant future but to delivering progress now,” said Mars’s chief sustainability officer, Alastair Child.

Child added: “Societal impact goals have to be built into business decision making. And to continue to deliver progress consistently, we need systemic change across our supply chains, with governments, industry, and farmers all playing a role. We know we can’t do this alone, and so we want to bring our partners and peers along, as only large-scale change will deliver on our collective goals.”