Our Global President, Mars Food, Multisales and Global Customers, Fiona Dawson, wrote a compelling piece for The Telegraph in the U.K., emphasizing obligations businesses have to rise to the challenge of feeding a growing planet with limited resources. Today, rice is a daily staple for 3.5 billion people worldwide. Tomorrow, we need to increase rice production 25% in the next 25 years to feed our growing global population. 

At Mars, we know that the ingredients to a healthy diet and happy family often can be found in the kitchen. Kids who spend time cooking with their families today can develop healthy eating habits and valuable life skills they’ll carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Our Global Health and Wellbeing Ambition has a simple objective: We are working toward our ambition to deliver 1 billion more healthy meals, for a total of 4 billion healthy meals, shared on dinner tables around the world by 2021. Our bold ambition is inspired by our Mars Food purpose — Better Food Today. A Better World Tomorrow. And our Associates work every day to champion the importance of dinnertime by inspiring people to cook and eat together.

Chances are, you have a box or bag of rice in your pantry right now. The chances also are you consider it a given — that rice is plentiful and a food source so popular across the world it could never be in short supply.

After more than a century in business, we've learned a few things — namely that the most successful and sustainable business practices are those that mutually benefit everyone involved. As a global food business, we're dependent on smallholder farms. So it's our responsibility to ensure smallholder farmers who grow ingredients essential to Mars products are able to earn an income that allows them to support their farms, families and communities now and into the future.