Our Products
Product Energy Use
Our efforts to minimize our impacts do not stop when our brands leave our factories. We want to help consumers reduce environmental impacts when they use our products, including the energy consumed by our drinks machines and used when cooking our foods.
Energy Use in Drinks Machines
Our Drinks machines served their first beverage in 1955. Today, they provide more than 35,000 businesses with more than a billion beverages each year.
We are working to increase the energy efficiency of our FLAVIA® and KLIX® hot drinks machines. Lifecycle analysis shows that more than two-thirds of the energy used to make a FLAVIA® drink is for heating the water before brewing the coffee, tea or hot chocolate. Providing efficient drinks machines that use less energy will help customers reduce both their energy bills and greenhouse-gas emissions.
Since 2007, we have reduced the energy consumption of our machine base by 21 percent. When compared against three leading bean-to-cup machines in the U.K., the FLAVIA C400 was calculated to be 52-percent more energy efficient over a typical week.
In the U.K., customers can go online to calculate the financial and environmental benefits of our products compared with those of our competition: myflavia
Energy Use for Cooking Rice
Since opening the world’s first commercial parboiling rice plant in Houston, Texas, in 1943, our Mars Food business has continued to make rice that gives consumers healthy, easy-to-prepare and great tasting options.
Since then, we have used innovative technology to reduce the cooking time of our UNCLE BEN'S® rice by half, from 20 to 10 minutes, contributing to a lower carbon footprint for a large part of our portfolio. This lower cooking time has reduced the carbon footprint of cooking within the total life-cycle of this type of rice by 18 percent. For more information on the impact of growing rice, see Our Supply Chain.
Consumers affect carbon emissions through the amount of water they use and the heat sources they select to cook the rice: for example, gas, electricity or microwave. We share helpful tips with our consumers on our packaging about how to cook UNCLE BEN'S® rice in a way that reduces energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions during preparation.
Suggestions include using gas rather than electricity and putting a lid on the pan, a simple step that can reduce the carbon footprint of the cooking stage by up to 70 percent. To learn more, watch
