Mars announces major change to chocolate bars

The popular chocolate bars will be trialled with environmentally-friendly paper packaging

The move comes after development work and investments, with the trial achieving a reduction in plastic on the chocolate bar wrapper (PA)

Mars has announced a major change to its popular chocolate bars.

As part of a pilot, the product – combining milk chocolate, caramel and nougat – will now be wrapped in recyclable paper instead of plastic.

The move is in a bid to make the product – a firm British favourite since the 1930s – more environmentally friendly.

Like many other products, Mars bars’ plastic wrappers cannot be recycled.

The bars will be available in Tesco stores during the pilot.

The very first Mars bars were made by hand in 1932, later distributed to troops fighting in the Second World War between 1939 and 1945.

The move is part of the company’s sustainability plan, which sees it investing millions in a bid to reduce virgin plastics usage by a third in the short term.

Mars isn’t the only firm to explore packaging alternatives: Nestle rolled out paper packaging for its Smarties products in January 2021, followed by a number of Quality Street sweets in December 2022.

Richard Sutherland-Moore, packaging expert at Mars Wrigley UK’s research and development centre in Slough, said: “We are exploring different types of alternative packaging solutions for our confectionery products.

“For Mars bar, the challenge was to find the right paper packaging solution with an adequate level of barrier properties to protect the chocolate whilst guaranteeing the food safety, quality and integrity of the product to prevent food waste.”

Earlier this year, Tesco became the first UK retailer to go peat-free on its British-grown bedding plants in a move hoping to lower the firm’s carbon footprint.

Likewise, Mars achieved carbon neutrality earlier in 2023 for the first time in its history, reached through reductions in carbon emissions.