Sustainably sourcing your favorite treats

By Alissa Marturano and Jeremy Schifeling

For us at Mars, sustainability is business as usual: we always aim to take responsibility for our global footprint, and we’re constantly setting new goals for what we’d like to accomplish.

These goals run much deeper than focusing on sustainability initiatives for the chocolate in your M&M’S. And it goes further than only working with suppliers that meet our standards. Across Mars Chocolate and Wrigley North America, we’re making strides to ensure that key ingredients from mint to peanuts to dairy are sourced properly, ensuring products are both tastier for our consumers and better for the environment and the people in communities we work with.

Creating a sustainable sourcing program

A smart, sustainable sourcing program begins in the same way as any thoughtful strategy — with research. Over the past year, we’ve worked to map our global supply chains, determining where each of our key ingredients comes from — no small feat. We then looked at our supply chains and assessed the impact challenges associated with each ingredient across five areas: greenhouse gas emissions, water use, land use, human rights and farmer income.

The process started with an analysis of key raw materials across Mars Chocolate — sugar, palm, dairy, peanuts, coconut, hazelnuts and cocoa — as well mint, pulp and paper for packaging on the Wrigley side. This help us understand the global challenges our ingredients and supply chain face. What follows is a glimpse at how we are defining these programs and determining how we can make a big impact.

Cutting emissions to fight climate change

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel use are of the upmost important to us. It’s top of mind for our partners as well. For example, we’re currently working with the dairy industry to better understand how we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions — one of the biggest challenges in dairy. Partnerships with organizations like the Dairy Sustainability Framework and the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform take us one step closer to this goal.

At Mars we engage with the industry, NGOs and universities in developing innovative best practices to reduce the environmental impacts of mint farming. We look at areas ranging from plant productivity, decreasing water usage, efficiencies and alternatives in processing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, our Associates at Wrigley collaborated with the Mint Industry Research Council to educate North American farmers on the environmental and economic benefits of using natural gas over diesel fuel. As of May 2014, these farmers had converted 18 percent of their total mint production from diesel to propane or natural gas, resulting in a reduction of over 8,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Partnering for a stronger future

Partnering with other organizations is one of the best ways to ensure we are making quick and significant progress toward our sustainability goals. This year, Mars Chocolate established a partnership with Field to Market, the U.S. alliance for sustainable agriculture. Our collaboration with Field to Market provides the opportunity to work with numerous industry players from retailers and manufacturers to growers and NGOs. It will also help to ensure we’re learning key insights from others around their supply chains and efficient solutions. We are proud to support the American Peanut Council’s collaboration with Field to Market, as the entire peanut industry is working together to obtain even better sustainability data of peanut production. Through these efforts, the peanut industry, and most importantly the farmer, will be able to demonstrate progress and drive continuous improvement at the farm level.

In the face of climate change, crop competitiveness and changing economies, sustainability is more important now than ever before. It is our hope that in the next five to 10 years, more companies will begin to think about who they work with and how to ensure sustainable sourcing of materials. Without a sustainability strategy, after all, we wouldn’t have a sustainable business.

Alissa and Jeremy are Sustainable Sourcing Insights Managers for Mars Chocolate & Wrigley.