Mars Food

Bite-sized facts:

• More than 1,700 Associates

• Fourteen brands in total. UNCLE BEN’S^® is a billion-dollar global brand and more than 50 years old

• Other well-known and trusted brands include: DOLMIO^®, MASTERFOODS^®, SEEDS OF CHANGE^®, EBLY^®, ROYCO^®, KAN TONG^®, SUZI WAN^® and RARIS^®

Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, Mars Food is dedicated to providing leading food brands tailored to local tastes around the globe. Mars Food employs more than 1,700 Associates worldwide across 10 countries. Mars Food is a growing company with a passion for making great-tasting food that gives consumers easy, healthy options.

Mars Foodservices is dedicated to growing Mars’ out-of-home presence and brand availability in the food service channel, e.g. restaurants, schools, hotels, hospitals and other out-of-home outlets.

Our Principles in Action

As a major food company, we recognize our responsibility to help consumers make healthy choices, ensure our ingredients are produced sustainably and reduce our operational impacts.

Our philosophy is to make good food today in a way that allows us to preserve nature’s resources for tomorrow. We work with our suppliers and other partners to find ways of reducing our joint impact on the planet. We make sure our operations are run as efficiently as possible with respect for the environment, find innovative ways to transport ingredients and finished products, continuously improve the packaging materials we use, as well as encouraging our consumers to dispose of them responsibly.

Mars, Incorporated was the first global food company to voluntarily roll out front-of-pack nutritional labels that are easy to understand, and 70 percent of Mars Food products carried GDA labels at the end of 2011. We have committed to implement GDA labeling on 100 percent of our food portfolio by year-end 2013 (excluding condiment packs that are too small to carry GDA information).

We put a lot of care into making our products the best they can possibly be. Our recipes are based on ingredients you can find in any kitchen cupboard, made by Associates who share a passion for food. Our UNCLE BEN’S^® brand offers consumers around the world a range of great tasting and convenient products for healthy meals and lifestyles. We are expanding our portfolio of whole grain products, reducing salt, and enhancing the nutrient content of UNCLE BEN’S^® products and other key brands. In 2011, UNCLE BEN’S^® Ready Rice^® Whole Grain Brown was the first whole grain brown rice in North America to officially provide consumers with a “Good Source of Fiber”.

We have been working with the University of California, Davis and the University of Arkansas to improve the sustainability of our rice products. This work aims to identify rice varieties that produce lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than the varieties that we currently use. Preliminary results have identified that rice varieties may affect levels of GHG emissions, which suggests that future efforts could be directed toward selecting rice varieties that emit less GHG.

Our organics business, SEEDS OF CHANGE®, has recently introduced a Home Garden Starter Kit that makes it easy to grow delicious heirloom organic tomatoes. The complete, eco-friendly, all-in-one kit contains everything needed to start a seedling on a windowsill, which can then be planted directly into a garden or a larger pot. Each seedling produces 15–20 heirloom organic tomatoes.

On the eve of Earth Month in March 2011, SEEDS OF CHANGE® partnered with celebrity chef Rick Bayless and New York Restoration Project (NYRP) to launch the Sowing Millions Project, a campaign that aims to inspire organic gardening and encourage community gardening projects by giving away 100 million certified organic seeds. The campaign was extremely successful, with all 100 million seeds requested in two days. SEEDS OF CHANGE® donated an additional 2.5 million seeds for NYRP to use in their 700 community gardens throughout the year.