Our Mars Food Nutrition Criteria Approach
Read the full Mars Nutrition Criteria – Third Edition
We believe a better world tomorrow is one where everyone has access to healthy food. That’s why we’ve committed to delivering 5.5 billion healthy meals by 2025. We will also add 4 billion servings of vegetables, provide a 30% increase of fiber servings in our products, and an additional 5% reduction of sodium in our portfolio globally by 2025.
The Mars Food Nutrition Criteria guides our approach to provide healthier food and meet these commitments. It includes limits for added sugar, salt, and fat content in all of our Mars Food products, as well as targets for the inclusion of vegetables, wholegrains and legumes. Our criteria are ambitious – we adopt the strictest and most widely agreed upon nutrition recommendations issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other leading public health authorities.
We use the Mars Food Nutrition Criteria to guide product innovation and reformulation to meet our 2025 commitments. It also helps us to track the nutritional composition of our Mars Food portfolio over time. By setting a high bar for our products, we can help more consumers across the world enjoy healthier meals. Our ambition is to ensure that 95% of our products will meet our Criteria’s standards for added sugar, salt, and fat by 2025.
As we developed the Mars Food Nutrition Criteria, we took into consideration how our products are used as part of a dinnertime meal – either as condiments, recipe bases, main meals, or side dishes. We aim to develop products that fit into healthy diets balanced over the course of several days or a week, allowing for the occasional treat and special meal that helps to bring everyone together around the dinner table.
Our journey, commitments and progress
We published the first edition of the Mars Food Nutrition Criteria in 2015, setting the foundation for the launch of our Health & Wellbeing ambition one year later to deliver one billion more healthy meals shared on dinner tables around the world by 2021.
Since then, we are proud to say we have exceeded this ambition and this brings the total number of healthy meals provided by Mars Food to more than 4 billion between 2016-2021. In 2020, 84% of our portfolio (by sales volume) met our Mars Food Nutrition Criteria for calories, sodium, added sugar and saturated fat, which is an increase from 77.4% in 2019 and from 62% in 2015. Despite our progress, we know that we still have more work to do and we are committed to going further so we can make sure that nutrition is never compromised by convenience. That’s why at the start of 2021, we set ourselves a new ambition to deliver 5.5 billion healthy meals by 2025.
This Third Edition of the Mars Food Nutrition Criteria will support us to deliver these new stretching goals so we can give more people access to better food. This updated version repeats the principles behind our approach and adds further considerations of how our portfolio contributes to dietary fiber intake as well as re-emphasizing the importance of adding fruits and vegetables to dinnertime meals. It also includes updated references because it’s important we regularly review our framework in line with the latest science.
Read our Purpose in Action Report to find out more about the progress we’re making towards our Health and Wellbeing ambition as part of our wider work to deliver our Purpose – Better Food Today. A Better World Tomorrow.