Mars’ leader on sustainability is also the candymaker’s chief climate officer: How that C-suite combo is paying off

Mars — the $50 billion privately held maker of Ben’s rice, Pedigree pet food and M&M’s confections — has managed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 16 percent since its 2015 baseline while growing overall revenue by 60 percent in that same time period.

It will need to more than double those reductions to meet a decade-end goal calling for a 50 percent cumulative cut in absolute emissions. So far, its short-term plans are promising although the path to its long-term ambitions is vague, according to an analysis published in April by researchers at New Climate Institute. “Mars presents emission reduction measures that can – in total – reduce the company’s value chain emissions by more than the desired 50 percent by 2030,” the firm said.

The biggest impediment to the 2030 goal is getting people to recognize what they don’t know and challenging them to build a new knowledge base, according to the 30-year Mars veteran Kevin Rabinovitch who has played a role in shaping its climate strategy since August 2007.

To improve its chances for success, Rabinovitch and his team are overseeing Mars’ investment of nearly $3 billion through 2026 on innovations for dairy methane reductions (the second largest impact for its snacking business), renewable thermal technology, packaging redesign, regenerative agriculture and efficiency.

“If you ask someone who’s, you know, trained as a mechanical engineer to design a better fan, they’re building on hundreds of years of engineering [and] fan design, so they really know the constraints of the problem they’re trying to solve,” said Rabinovitch. “If you ask that same individual to design a decarbonization strategy, they don’t have 100 textbooks they can go look at … Too often, I see people falling into the trap of, ‘I don’t know how to do this, so it must not be possible, right?’ ”

Not only does Rabinovitch hold the title of vice president of global sustainability but he is also the chief climate officer at Mars, for now a rarity of combined roles that for Mars reflects the importance of changing the mindset. It’s “a way of drawing attention to the fact that we treat climate and sustainability at large as a topic of real strategic business importance in the same way you would with any other sort of C-suite role,” he said on the latest episode of the Climate Pioneers interview series. “The title is really reflecting the intentionality in terms of how we work.”

Part of the business plan

Mars includes metrics and key performance indicators for environmental sustainability in the “Compass” that has guided all business decisions at the candymaker, pet food and snacking company since 2018. It includes four quadrants that guide decisions, not just by executive leadership but across the entire organization:

• Financial performance
• Quality growth
• Positive societal impact 
• Establishing Mars as a trusted partner

“That compass cascades not only into what the owners and board are asking the business to deliver, it cascades into senior leadership compensation as part of that, creating a reinforcing mechanism that will drive the results that we want,” Rabinovitch said. 

The two non-traditional metrics on the compass have a 20 percent weight in the long-term incentives for Mars’ top 400 managers. They consider progress on emissions reduction targets and Mars’ reputation as a trusted partner that considers all stakeholders, including employees, customers, supply chain and society.

Close scrutiny of acquisition targets

Much of Mars’ revenue growth in the past four years has come through acquisitions, and it has restated its emissions accounting to incorporate the results at companies it integrates. Potential combinations are evaluated for their potential impacts on Mars’ environmental strategy and other societal metrics, Rabinovitch said. Among the considerations:

• Whether the target company will be a drag on Mars 50 percent reduction by 2030 pledge
• Existing decarbonization, water conservation and waste management strategies in place at the acquisition target
• The potential cost of investments required to cut energy use or adopt renewable electricity and thermal power
• Individual products or portfolios that extend Mars leadership in plant-based market segments

Would Mars walk away from a merger because of these factors? “Businesses with heavy sustainability burdens that we don’t see a path to solving for wouldn’t really be consistent with the quality growth [quadrant]. So that’s absolutely part of the process,” Rabinovitch said. 

When this article was filed, Mars was closing a $36 billion takeover of Kellanova, the maker of Pringles, Cheez-It and Pop-Tart spun out of Kellogg’s in September 2023. The union, one of the biggest deals announced in 2024, was approved by Kellanova shareholders in early November. 

Kellanova’s strategy for emission reductions wasn’t yet set, but the company was in the process of setting science-based targets to align with net zero by 2050. Kellogg’s previously reduced absolute Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 31.1 percent between 2015 and 2022. It cut its Scope 3 by 13 percent by 21.2 percent. Approximately 40 percent of the electricity used for operations was balanced by renewable sources.

Mars also considers consumer interest in environmental sustainability to screen for targets in new markets. “We also recognize there are some businesses where they have products and services that represent opportunities from a sustainability point of view, and that’s part of our thinking as well,” Rabinovitch said. 

Since 2020, Mars has bought at least four brands known for their focus on health and wellness, including Kevin’s Natural Foods, a maker of premade, sous vide meals that are dairy, gluten and soy free. In December 2022; Tru Fru, which uses whole fruits for its snack brands; and Kind, the maker of nut bars that also owns Nature’s Bakery. 

New procurement policies 

One of Mars’ most effective levers for cutting emissions has been cutting suppliers tied to deforestation, said Rabinovitch. Mars expects to complete by the end of 2025 a mapping exercise to trace the origin of key raw ingredients for its products including beef, cocoa, palm oil, pulp and paper, and soy. It uses satellite information, drones, sensors and other publicly available information, such as the Global Forest Watch from the World Resources Institute, to create these maps.

Mars used this data to shrink its palm oil supply chain after discovering that the company was exposed to almost a third of the mills on the planet, even though it sourced nowhere near a third of the palm oil used for products. By consolidating buying power with a smaller number of suppliers, Mars is better able to influence their agricultural and land use policies, Rabinovitch said. 

In return, Mars has reshaped its contracts with farmers and mills that are adopting emissions reduction practices. “It can be longer-term contracts,” he said. “It can be more strategic relationships. It can be upfront investments that Mars makes in training or education or, in some cases, even some of the equipment, the hardware assets to enable these transformations.” 

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