Behind the Mars Bar: looking deeper for sustainable food companies

Mars is the world’s largest privately owned food company with $30 billion in revenues and more than 65,000 workers around the world in 2012. It produced its first ever sustainability report recently in 2011. It was also one of the first big companies to deliver its CSR report on Facebook.

In a refreshing claim to appreciating longer time frames Paul Michaels writes in Mars's Five Principles report:  “As a private company governed by the Mars family, we think in terms of generations, not quarterly returns.” But the company does not take the step of recognising natural times scales.

Mars do have a high impact upon farming practices so adopting natural time scales would not be out of place in the company. Mars does after all call for a joint industry effort to scale up positive impacts for cocoa farmers and achieve higher yields without compromising limited natural resources so longer, more natural time scales are definitely required.

But perhaps the most significant step that Mars have taken lies in their Five Principles report. As one of the five principles, Mars have adopted Mutuality which they describe as follows:

·         A mutual benefit is a shared benefit; a shared benefit will endure.

·         We believe the standard by which our business relationships should be measured is the degree to which mutual benefits are created.

·         These benefits can take many different forms, and need not be strictly financial in nature. Likewise, while we must try to achieve the most competitive terms, the actions of Mars should never be at the expense, economic or otherwise, of others with whom we work.

According to Mars, the mutual benefits need not be financial in nature and yet they are to be the standard by which their business relations should be measured. Indeed rummaging around their website reveals a wealth measured in non-financial benefits including the sponsorship of science.

So how is Mars able to recognise these revolutionary steps in business management? At one level there is a simple answer that all companies can implement and that is they pay full attention to the knowledge we now possess of the world in which we live. A new Primal possibility of knowledge is present in the world and we are slowly taking advantage of all its exciting opportunities to make the world a better place.

The other answer is not so simple and it is likely few major companies can implement it in their present form. It is an answer that has to do with Keynes’ 1933 article on National Sufficiency:  “But experience is accumulating that remoteness between ownership and operation is an evil in the relations among men, likely or certain in the long run to set up strains and enmities which will bring to nought the financial calculation,” (see The Accountant’s Economic Revolution in the PR blog, 25^th November 2012).

Mars is a private company. It does not have to worry about maintaining a position in the financial markets. In this sense Mars has greater freedom to adapt to the emerging Primal knowledge of our world; it is not for example constrained by overweening and restricting notions of Modern good financial performance. But Mars does have remote operations created and maintained throughout its supply chain; it therefore needs to ensure that the dictates of financial performance do not reduce overall Mutuality to considerations of dominant economic aspects.

Oxfam is more critical of Mars. In its assessment of the Big 10 food companies, Oxfam ranks Mars with a 30% score which is a “Poor” performance lying in fifth place behind Nestle, Unilever, Coca-Cola and Pepsico. Middle-ranking Mars received low scores with regards to supporting women and protecting land rights, but did better with transparency and small-scale farmers. 

Big 10 Food Companies Sustainability Scorecard
Taken from Oxfam's "Behind the Brands" Report

In its Behind the Brands report, Oxfam provides a scorecard assessment of the performance of the Big ten food companies. Financial performance is not included in this assessment which deals only with social and environmental aspects of performance. Overall, Oxfam concludes that the Big 10 fail to address the root causes of hunger and poverty – which is a powerful indictment of companies set up to feed people.

The Big 10 of course do feed people, i.e. people who can pay and hence we return full circle to Keynes’ observation of the “evil in the relations among men”. Only this time it is not the remoteness of the owners of capital from operations but it is now revealed in the remoteness of buyers from suppliers in supply chains and markets.

Nonetheless PR congratulates Mars and the other Big 10 food companies for their sustainability principles and achievements so far. They are all good examples of companies in the throws of a major transition. But there remains a long way to go before we can fully implement the changes and opportunities that the emerging Primal episteme provides; for that to happen we need to have companies that understand and act upon the principle of fitting into the natural and societal relations science now accepts as the basis of reality in the living world. This will take time - but time is not something that hungry people and species on the edge of extinction possess.