I might just have mentioned a few times – a few hundred times probably – in my writing that I started my procurement career at Mars. I was a graduate trainee in the factory, then moved into Management Sciences, had a (pretty unsuccessful) year in Sales and was then encouraged to apply for a job in Purchasing, which I got. After a couple of years buying raw materials, I was promoted to be Head of Packaging Buying. That was 1985, and Mars at the time was at the tail-end of a transition in packaging. In the late seventies, most of the filled bar products moved away from paper based packaging to plastic-based wrappers – mainly polypropylene. Galaxy chocolate bars still had foil and paper wrappers in my day, and I think some of the sugar products still used paper too. The biggest rival to the Mars Bar, KitKat, stayed with paper for many years.
Polypropylene protected the product better and extended the shelf life. It was also less likely to get damaged itself. It also ran better than paper through high-speed wrapping machines. The product looked better on the shelf too, with the nice shiny wrappers and vivid colour printing. And to be honest, nobody then even thought about plastic waste, emissions, fossil fuel issues and so on.
Now, in 2023, things are moving full circle. Last week, Mars announced a trial of paper-based wrappers for Mars Bars. For a limited period, the paper-wrapped bars will be sold in 500 Tesco stores, Tesco being the number one retail customer for the firm. The benefit is that potentially one day thousands of tonnes of wrappers could be recycled rather than ending up in landfill. It follows the move by Nestle, one of the biggest competitors to Mars, who ditched traditional foil and plastic wrappers for Quality Street and replaced that with recyclable paper last Christmas.
Is this just a gimmick, to burnish Mars’ environmental credentials? Is it a sales thing, hoping to get lots of publicity and perhaps a nice boost in sales? Or is this a serious trial to look at the feasibility of a wider roll-out for paper? Adam Grant, General Manager, Mars Wrigley UK, said this on the firm’s website. “With this pilot project, we’re taking a big step to see how paper-based packaging works in everyday life. And while (we realize) challenges might impact the pace of progress towards our vision, we’re committed to scaling up viable solutions where recycling options exist and to test, learn, partner and advocate where they don’t.”
In terms of potential freshness issues, product turnover in Tesco must be pretty rapid, so it is not typical of the entire market for the Mars products. The shelf-life issue around the wrappers must be key if the product eventually goes into supply chains that move more slowly (wholesaler to small chain of shops to individual corner shops, for example). However, the new wrappers do contain a “tiny” amount of plastic which must help in terms of freshness issues – and apparently this doesn’t affect the recyclability or degradability of the wrapper. I also don’t know what the cost differential might be, or even in which direction it currently is.
There’s a lot more about what Mars is doing here in their sustainable packaging plan. That focus on packaging is an important element of the overall Mars sustainability efforts. When various surveys have literally counted items of rubbish found on beaches, for example, Mars comes near the top of the list of firms who make the products. The soft drinks industry is the biggest culprit, with plastic Coke, Pepsi and similar bottles the worst source of rubbish, but alcoholic drink packaging, confectionery and savoury snack wrappers (crisps, etc.) are very commonplace too. So this is a big issue.
One outcome I can predict though. I’m fairly certain that the consuming public won’t have a big view one way or another. Changes in packaging that we agonised about internally in my days at Mars rarely made a blind bit of difference to sales. Even product names didn’t seem to matter much. For years, Mars executives in Slough fought against the US-based Mars family’s desire to change the name of Marathon to Snickers. “We’ve done market research, nobody in the UK will buy Snickers, it’s just a stupid name”, our brand managers would tell Forrest Mars. Finally, he said “JFDI” (as it were), so we did, as it was his firm after all. And the drop in sales was about 0.01%.