Mars and Mondelēz 2025 Packaging Sustainability Targets: Progress, Shortfalls, and What Comes Next
As sustainability deadlines that once felt comfortably distant have arrived, the global food and snacking industry is now facing a moment of reckoning. Two of the world's most recognizable snacking giants — Mars, Incorporated and Mondelēz International — set ambitious packaging sustainability targets for 2025, committing to reduce waste, increase recyclability, and shrink their environmental footprints. Their most recent sustainability reports show that both companies made meaningful strides forward. However, neither crossed every finish line they set for themselves, raising important questions about the realism of corporate sustainability pledges and what the road ahead looks like.
Why 2025 Was a Critical Milestone Year for Snack Packaging
The year 2025 was widely adopted across the consumer packaged goods industry as a benchmark year for packaging sustainability commitments. Driven by mounting regulatory pressure in Europe, shifting consumer expectations, and voluntary frameworks like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Global Commitment, major brands pledged to make their packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025. For companies as large as Mars and Mondelēz — whose products reach billions of consumers across dozens of countries — these commitments represent enormous operational, logistical, and material science challenges.
Meeting these goals requires not just internal changes to how packaging is designed, but also deep collaboration with suppliers, investment in new materials, and coordination with the fragmented global recycling infrastructure. That context matters when evaluating how both companies performed against their stated targets.
Mars: Progress Made, but Gaps Remain
Mars, the company behind M&M's, Snickers, Pedigree, and dozens of other global brands, has been vocal about its sustainability ambitions for years. Its packaging commitments centered on making 100% of its packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025, alongside goals related to reducing virgin plastic use and increasing recycled content.
According to the company's most recent sustainability disclosures, Mars made genuine headway on several fronts. The company advanced recyclability across a meaningful portion of its portfolio, and it continued its efforts to move away from multi-material packaging structures that are notoriously difficult to recycle. Investments in fiber-based alternatives and mono-material film solutions reflected a clear directional commitment.
Despite this progress, Mars acknowledged falling short of its 100% recyclability target by 2025. The complexity of transitioning flexible packaging formats — which dominate the confectionery and snack categories — proved a significant obstacle. Flexible plastics remain among the most challenging packaging materials to recycle at scale, largely because the infrastructure to collect and process them does not yet exist universally. Mars indicated that work continues and reaffirmed its commitment to reaching its targets, albeit on a revised timeline.
Mondelēz: Similar Trajectory, Similar Challenges
Mondelēz International, the company behind Oreo, Cadbury, Toblerone, and Ritz, among many others, set comparable packaging sustainability goals ahead of 2025. These included commitments to ensure a significant share of its packaging is designed to be recyclable, and to incorporate more recycled content into its materials.
The company's latest sustainability report tells a story of progress that mirrors Mars in several respects. Mondelēz has redesigned packaging across a number of key product lines, worked to simplify materials for easier recyclability, and pursued partnerships aimed at strengthening collection and recycling systems in markets where infrastructure is weak. In certain regions and product categories, the company achieved or came close to its recyclability design targets.
However, Mondelēz also fell short on some of its headline 2025 commitments. Like Mars, the brand grappled with the persistent challenge of flexible packaging in its biscuit and chocolate segments. The gap between designing packaging that is technically recyclable and ensuring that consumers can actually recycle it in practice — often referred to as the "design vs. reality" gap — remained a significant issue. Recycled content targets also proved difficult to meet consistently, given volatility in the supply of high-quality food-grade recycled materials.
The Common Thread: Systemic Barriers Beyond Brand Control
What both companies' reports make clear is that individual corporate action, however sincere and well-resourced, runs into the limits of the broader system. Among the most frequently cited obstacles are:
- Recycling infrastructure gaps: In many markets, the collection and sorting systems needed to handle flexible plastics, small formats, and multi-layer materials simply do not exist at the scale required. Brands can design for recyclability, but if the bins, trucks, and processing facilities aren't there, the material still ends up in landfill.
- Recycled content supply constraints: Food-contact-grade recycled materials — particularly recycled plastics — remain scarce and expensive relative to virgin alternatives. Regulatory requirements around food safety further limit which recycled materials can be used in direct food contact applications.
- Consumer behavior: Even well-designed recyclable packaging requires consumers to engage correctly with sorting and disposal systems, which vary enormously by geography.
- Global portfolio complexity: Both Mars and Mondelēz operate across scores of countries with differing regulations, infrastructure levels, and consumer behaviors, making a single global packaging standard extraordinarily difficult to implement uniformly.
What Comes Next for Mars, Mondelēz, and the Industry
The partial shortfalls reported by both companies are not unique to them — many major food and beverage brands have acknowledged similar gaps against their 2025 packaging pledges. The question now is how the industry recalibrates. Both Mars and Mondelēz appear committed to continuing their sustainability journeys rather than abandoning their goals, with updated timelines and evolved strategies expected to emerge in upcoming reports and communications.
Regulatory developments will play an increasing role in shaping that path forward. The European Union's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, extended producer responsibility schemes, and potential plastic taxes in multiple jurisdictions are adding legal force to what were previously voluntary commitments. For global brands, compliance is becoming non-negotiable.
Innovation will also be critical. Advances in paper-based flexible packaging, chemical recycling technologies, and bio-based materials are offering new pathways that weren't viable just a few years ago. Both companies have signaled ongoing investment in these areas.
The Bigger Picture: Accountability in Corporate Sustainability
The 2025 packaging deadline has served a valuable purpose even for companies that didn't fully meet it: it created accountability, galvanized internal action, and produced measurable data that didn't exist before. The fact that Mars and Mondelēz are publicly reporting both their progress and their shortfalls is itself a form of transparency that moves the conversation forward.
For consumers, investors, and regulators, the key now is to distinguish between brands that are genuinely working through hard systemic challenges and those using sustainability language as a shield without substantive action. The data in these sustainability reports, however imperfect, provides the raw material for that judgment. Both Mars and Mondelēz have shown they are moving in the right direction — the 2025 results will now define the baseline from which their next chapter of sustainability progress will be measured.