Mars Food starts fresh, plans growth from new Chicago HQ
CHICAGO – Mars Food hopes its new home in Chicago will prove fertile ground for growing a relatively small sliver of the global Mars business, known more for chocolate and pet care.
And in making the move from Los Angeles to Chicago, the new North American headquarters for the food business adds to Mars’ growing stronghold in Illinois, where the company now has more than 2,400 employees, five factories and five Chicago offices.
Beyond the pristine 20,000-square-foot open-plan office, situated across from the Mars Wrigley global innovation center, Mars Food begins this new era with a mostly revamped 75-person corporate workforce, some of whom were moved from other Mars business units in town – one of the benefits of moving to Chicago.
Their mission: Grow and evolve a business anchored by Uncle Ben’s, the portfolio’s lone $1 billion brand.
“It’s not only symbolic, it’s really a new chapter. The management team is new. We had to hire these people, onboard them, and still the process is in the making. Longer term, we think it’s a transformational change for us,” said Jarek Swigulski, Mars Food’s regional president for North America.
For any packaged food company, the future appears challenging as shoppers have increasingly eschewed older brands in the center-store aisles for food they consider to be fresher, more natural and of better quality. And Uncle Ben’s, launched more than 70 years ago, is no spring chicken.
But Swigulski said the company considers Uncle Ben’s age an asset. And Mars has more than offset sales declines in dry rice products with “very, very significant” growth in its microwavable Ready Rice products, he said.
At the same time, Mars Foods has worked to reduce sodium and incorporate other grains to contemporize Uncle Ben’s, he said.
“With such a long history, you have to rejuvenate the brand,” Swigulski said.
Though Mars Food has other brands in other countries, the North American headquarters in Chicago will support only Uncle Ben’s, Seeds of Change and, once the acquisition closes later this year, Tasty Bites. All three brands reflect the company’s focus on convenience and deliberate shift into more varied grains and legumes, he said.
Swigulski declined to provide sales or profit figures for the privately held business unit, but said sales were growing in the U.S. and globally.
Long known as a secretive company, closely guarding its methods from competitors, Mars is reaching outward more to appeal to a new generation of workers, executives said.
“It’s more and more important to people to work for companies they have a shared value with,” said Caroline Sherman, vice president of corporate affairs for Mars Food North America. “There’s no way for people to know that about us if we don’t tell our stories.”
Mars is the sixth largest private company in the U.S., with $35 billion in revenue, according to this year’s Forbes rankings. Chocolate, candy and pet care make up most of the business.
Mars Food is dwarfed by some of its new neighbors in Chicago’s food industry. Kraft Heinz, for example, has eight brands that bring in more than $1 billion in revenue; Mondelez International has six.
Within the Mars ecosystem, the food business is also small. Of the more than 50,000 Mars employees in the U.S., only about 300 support the food business.
Being smaller allows Mars Foods to be more agile in creating its own path forward, Swigulski said. Unlike some other global companies, the business units of Mars function independently for the most part, he said.
“People in Mars understand you buy your freedom and the right to make the calls if you deliver the results. It’s a performance-driven culture,” Swigulski said.
In Chicago, which Swigulski called the “(consumer packaged goods) capital of the U.S.,” Mars Food will have greater access to the workforce that will help drive those results.
“It may be a little bit of a slow burner, but it’s a strategic transformation to us,” Swigulski said. “If we didn’t believe the business would benefit, why the hassle?”