Dinnertime is better together

This week, we’ve published our third annual progress report on our Mars Food Health & Wellbeing Ambition to deliver One Billion More Healthy Meals Shared on Dinner Tables Around the World.

As well as making our products healthier, a key part of our Ambition is inspiring more people to sit down together to eat dinner.

That’s because we believe that cooking and eating together is good for us.

We are championing the importance of shared dinnertimes by inspiring people to cook and sit down to eat dinner together. We are also working to teach children basic kitchen skills because we believe it’s important they know how to cook as well as they can read or write.

Mars Food has some of the most iconic dinnertime brands in the world.

We believe that we should use this power to make a difference by inspiring more people to cook and eat together. In the last year alone, we’ve delivered some fantastic initiatives:

• In the US, our UNCLE BEN’S? BEN'S BEGINNERS? programme is now in its eighth year of inspiring families to cook together. So far, the programme has received over 2,900 contest entries from families, supported more than 50 schools and benefitted over 30,000 students and families through awards totalling $1.25m to date. For 2019, we will continue UNCLE BEN’S? BEN'S BEGINNERS? with a focus on encouraging families to cook and share dinnertime together.
•  In Belgium we partnered with retailer Carrefour to co-develop a community initiative that called ‘Time to Cook’. The instore offered consumers a free child’s stool when they purchased four UNCLE BEN’S? Ready to Heat products. The stool encourages children to join in the fun of cooking – with a height boost they are able to help parents prepare ingredients for a healthy meal while getting the perfect view of everything being cooked.
• In Australia, we piloted a Make Dinnertime Matter? project with children in primary schools. The four week project aimed to help educate approximately 100 students in Year 3 (aged 8-9 years old) on the value of a shared dinnertime and what they can do to contribute to making it easier for the family to cook and eat together. MASTERFOODS? partnered with Flinders University to carry out an assessment which helped us identify the most significant barriers to family dinnertime behaviour and we worked to design the curriculum to tackle these. This is the next step in the journey that started with a white paper in 2015 to better understand the benefits of cooking and sharing meals in company.

These are just some of the examples of how we are using the power of our brands to inspire more people around the world to cook and eat together.

You can read further about these initiatives, as well as our wider progress towards our Health & Wellbeing Ambition, in our report.