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.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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