Mars, the global company behind famous brands like M&M’s, Snickers, and Pedigree, has announced a major new initiative: a $250 million Sustainability Investment Fund. The fund supports innovations in agriculture, ingredients, and packaging. It focuses on areas that have the biggest impact on Mars’ environmental footprint and carbon emissions.
Mars is also working on its climate goals through the “Sustainable in a Generation” plan. The aim is to cut emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. Here’s how the fund fits into Mars’s sustainability journey—and why it matters for the food and consumer goods sector.
Why Mars Is Betting Big on Sustainability
Mars has tied up to 2,000 senior leaders’ compensation to emission reductions, showing strong internal accountability. But much of its carbon footprint—over 70%—comes from purchased goods and services like farming, animal feed, and materials.
Thus, the new fund will invest in the following areas to address those emission sources:
- Advanced Agriculture,
- Innovative Ingredients, and
- Next‑Gen Packaging
These focus areas target Mars’s main emissions hotspots. They aim to speed up solutions that go beyond traditional carbon offsets.
Here is how the fund will drive systemic change in the company’s quest for sustainability.
Modern Farming Practices
Mars will provide digital tools for farmers. These tools will help track fertilizer use, monitor soil health, and boost yields. They will also aid in reducing emissions. Remote sensing and satellites will help fight deforestation. They also improve traceability, which is important for sourcing ingredients.
Low‑Carbon Ingredients
The fund will finance innovation in plant-based proteins and raw materials. Shifting from animal-based inputs can significantly reduce emissions, water use, and supply‑chain risk.
Circular Packaging
Packaging improvements include replacing flexible plastics with compostable or recyclable alternatives. Mars has already achieved meaningful shifts and now seeks to support emerging materials at scale.
All these help the company advance its path to net zero by 2050.
A Net-Zero Game Plan Backed by Real Numbers
Mars has made strides in its emission reduction and net-zero goals. It cut greenhouse gas emissions by 16.4% since 2015. At the same time, revenue rose by 69%, hitting $55 billion in 2024. That includes a 1.9% drop in 2024 alone, as seen in the chart below.
By 2030, Mars aims to cut emissions by 50% throughout its entire value chain—Scopes 1, 2, and 3. The company will also integrate sustainability into executive performance.
The company also achieved several milestones in its net-zero journey, including:
- Transitioned 58% of its operations to renewable electricity, aiming for 100% by 2040.
- Made 64% of consumer packaging recyclable, reusable, or compostable.
- Launched climate-smart agriculture projects in 29 countries, across 60+ partnerships, including protecting 8,000 ha of forest in palm oil supply chains.
CEO Poul Weihrauch said during the launch of the sustainability investment fund,
“I’m pleased to see our continued ability to decouple our business growth from our carbon footprint while simultaneously investing in innovation and getting behind start-ups that will be creating new solutions and advance breakthroughs to help companies address resilience challenges. These are important areas to make meaningful progress in helping us to reduce exposure to future environmental risks, and eventually, turn it into profit and competitive advantage.”
This change marks a major step in blending scale with sustainability. Moreover, the company is buying high-quality carbon removal credits to offset emissions it cannot eliminate directly. These credits support carbon-neutral products like the Mars Bar. They help projects that remove CO₂ from the air, like reforestation and soil carbon efforts. The credits are verified by trusted standards, including the Gold Standard and Verra.
Mars views carbon removals as a key tool in its Net Zero by 2050 strategy. This is especially true for tough sectors like agriculture. The company invests in projects like the €150 million Livelihoods Carbon Fund 3. This fund supports nature-based carbon removal and helps develop communities.
Beyond Carbon: Mars’s Broader ESG Mission
Mars goes beyond carbon. Its reef restoration initiative has received over $10 million since 2020, deploying innovative “Reef Stars” in 12 countries to boost coral recovery.
The company also works on water stewardship and farmer livelihoods, aiming to help 30% of suppliers earn a living income by 2027. Some rice projects in Thailand increased yields by up to 43% while cutting water use by over 40%.
More notably, Mars ties 20% of executive pay to emissions progress. This makes sustainability a key part of its corporate culture.
Market Momentum Meets Mission-Driven Investment
Mars’s Sustainability Fund comes at a time when global demand for sustainable solutions is rapidly growing. The sustainable packaging market, a key focus area for Mars, is experiencing significant expansion. The market is expected to rise from $292.7 billion in 2024 to USD 423.6 billion by 2029, growing at a compound annual rate of 7.7%.
Additionally, over 54% of U.S. consumers now choose eco-friendly packaging. Also, 90% prefer brands that use it. Mars’s move towards sustainable materials matches what consumers want and where the market is heading.
The fund also taps into expanding carbon credit markets, particularly in agriculture, forestry, and land use (AFOLU). The market could rise from $5.8 billion in 2024 to $7.5 billion in 2025. This shows a nearly 29% annual growth rate. By 2029, it could hit $20.8 billion.
Carbon farming—which aligns with Mars’s agricultural footprint—could generate as much as $13.7 billion in credits annually by 2050. These trends suggest that innovative ag-focused investments may yield strong returns while advancing climate impact.
On the broader carbon removal front, the market is set to rise from about $733 million in 2024 to nearly $2.85 billion by 2034. This shows a projected growth rate of 14.5% each year. As Mars supports sustainable farming and packaging technologies, these markets offer both environmental value and long-term economic opportunity.
Why This Matters to Industry and Investors
Mars is a major player in food and pet care, including snack favorites and pet nutrition. Its investments set sector-wide signals on value-chain decarbonization, sustainable sourcing, and packaging evolution.
The fund’s 250 million-dollar commitment matches the scale already seen in clean agriculture and materials innovation. It provides early funding for innovative solutions. This way, it links financial success to environmental performance.
Investors should note Mars’s strong execution: a 16% emissions cut amid significant growth shows ambitious goals are feasible.
Mars’s Sustainability Investment Fund marks a strategic leap beyond internal emissions cuts. It tackles systemic issues—agriculture, packaging, ingredients—using innovative solutions.
As consumer goods and agriculture industries face climate pressures, Mars offers a model of responsible leadership. It funds future technologies and places sustainability at its core. This shows that profitable growth and caring for the planet can go hand-in-hand.
The post Mars Invests $250M in Sustainable Innovations to Boost Net Zero Journey appeared first on Carbon Credits.
The accounting differences that decide whether your nature investment shows up in inventory, in BVCM, or nowhere at all.
The question reaches a procurement team about three weeks before the next sustainability committee meeting. Someone has read about insetting. Someone else has just signed off on an offset purchase. The CSO wants to know if the two are interchangeable. The answer is no, and the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard is the reason why.
This article walks through what each term means at audit-grade specificity, what the standards actually say about how each gets counted, and how to decide which tool fits which target. The insetting vs offsetting question is one of the most-searched in corporate climate strategy, and one of the most poorly answered. By the end of this piece, you should be able to brief a committee on the difference without notes.
The two definitions, in plain English
Offsetting means buying carbon credits generated outside your value chain and retiring them against your residual emissions. The reduction happens somewhere else, financed by you, and the credit is the receipt.
Insetting means investing in emission reductions or removals inside your own value chain, typically with suppliers, where the reduction is directly linked to the products and services you buy. The reduction happens inside the boundary of your Scope 3 inventory, and the accounting treatment is fundamentally different.
The shorthand from the University of Oxford’s Nature-based Insetting Initiative is useful: insetting is what you do with the supply chain you have; offsetting is what you do with the supply chain you do not have.
What the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard actually says
The GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard, finalised in 2024 after a multi-year pilot, sets the rules for how land-based emission reductions and removals enter corporate inventories. The Standard distinguishes between inventory accounting (Scope 1, 2, and 3) and project or intervention accounting (a separate methodology for crediting).
For insetting, the practical implication is that supplier-level interventions, when properly measured and attributed, can reduce your Scope 3 category 1 (purchased goods and services) emissions in your inventory. The reduction is not a credit retired against the inventory; it is a lower inventory number, period.
For offsetting, the credit is retired separately. It can be reported as a contribution toward a net-zero claim under the SBTi Beyond Value Chain Mitigation framework or as part of a VCMI Carbon Integrity claim, but it does not lower the inventory number.
A practical consequence: if your Science Based Target requires a 50% absolute reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030, insetting moves you toward the target. Offsetting does not. This single point of difference reshapes the procurement decision.
When insetting counts toward Scope 3 (and when it does not)
Insetting counts toward Scope 3 only when several conditions are met:
- The intervention must occur with an entity in your value chain.
- The emissions reduction or removal must be measured against a defensible baseline.
- The reduction must be attributed to your share of that supplier’s output, not double-counted with other buyers.
- It must follow the inventory accounting rules in the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard, not the project accounting rules used to generate credits.
The most common failure mode is double counting. If your supplier sells the same reduction as a credit on the voluntary market and also reports it to you as a Scope 3 reduction, the math breaks. The Standard requires you to address this risk, typically by purchasing and retiring the supplier-issued credit as part of your inventory or by contractual provisions that prevent the supplier from selling the reduction twice.
When insetting does not count toward Scope 3: when the intervention sits with a supplier you do not buy from, when the baseline is not defensible, when the attribution is unclear, or when the documentation does not survive audit. Those cases default to Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, which is still useful but operates on a different ledger.
The procurement and supplier engagement question
Insetting is harder than offsetting. That is the unfashionable truth most buyers eventually confront. Offsetting is a transaction; insetting is a relationship.
To run an insetting program, you need supplier mapping precise enough to know which farms or facilities sit at which Scope 3 boundary. You need an engagement model that gets suppliers to participate, which usually requires multi-year commitments and shared economics. You need an MRV architecture that measures the right things and produces audit-ready documentation. And you need a contractual structure that prevents double counting and protects both sides.
The trade-off you receive in return is significant. Reductions count against your inventory rather than your residual. Supplier relationships deepen, which protects sourcing continuity. Yield and quality improvements often follow regenerative interventions, which reduces your input cost over time. And the regulatory file, under CSRD, CSDDD, EUDR, and the SBTi FLAG Guidance, is materially stronger.
Choosing the right tool for the right target
A practical decision rule. If your target is a science-based Scope 3 reduction and you operate in a FLAG sector or source FLAG commodities, insetting is the structurally correct tool. If your target is a net-zero claim that includes neutralising hard-to-abate residual emissions outside your value chain, BVCM via high-integrity offsets is the structurally correct tool. Most companies with material Scope 3 exposure need both, in different proportions, sequenced over time.
The sequencing matters. Insetting takes longer to stand up but produces a permanent reduction in the inventory. Offsetting can be transacted faster but does not change the inventory and now sits under tighter claim restrictions. Treat them as complementary tools with different jobs, not as substitutes. The Accountability Framework Initiative and the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions both provide useful guardrails for the insetting side, with biodiversity, human rights, and benefit-sharing requirements that go beyond carbon math.
If you are mapping a Scope 3 reduction roadmap and need to scope which interventions count toward your inventory versus which sit in Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you structure a nature-based supply chain investment program that fits your FLAG exposure, your target architecture, and your audit horizon. Schedule a consultation.
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