Raising Rice Right: How Ben's Original™ is Protecting Your Favorite Grains
Every day, billions of people around the world sit down to enjoy a delicious, wholesome bowl of rice. At Ben's Original™, we believe that every single bowl has a story that is much bigger than the dish itself. It is a story of dedicated farmers, and entire communities, that depend on those tiny grains for their livelihoods.
While the consumer demand is rising, rice farmers are facing numerous, complex and urgent challenges. These range from increasingly unpredictable weather patterns to water scarcity and keeping the next generation on the farm.
At Mars, we believe it’s time to think big about the future of rice crops. That’s why we have launched the Raising Rice Right platform. By championing good agriculture practices, we support our farmers and help them get the best out of their fields. We partner directly with them to assess their current agricultural methods and to identify ways to increase efficiency in future.
Why Rice Farming Must Evolve
Climate Change is making the weather less predictable, water more precious and farming more demanding. That’s why we are investing a total of $20 million between 2020 and 2030 in our rice supply chain. This decade-long investment is directly focused on partnering with rice farmers and suppliers to help them adopt good agricultural practices that have the objective of protecting yields and building long-term resilience. We are actively scaling these efforts across our primary sourcing regions, including Uruguay, Spain, Italy, India, Pakistan and Thailand.
Why the impact of our rice supply chain matters
Adopting good agriculture practices helps to deliver benefits that reach beyond the farm gate:
- Keeps rice on supermarket shelves and consumers’ plates as we look for ways to help protect yields from climate shocks
- Supports farming families and rural communities
- Protects affordable pricing by reducing input costs and stabilizing supply
- Maintains the quality and taste consumers expect
Scaling Good Agriculture for Farmers and the Future
Good agriculture works: We are evaluating different solutions that can be adapted to very different rice growing regions. What’s needed now is to scale these interventions, with industry-wide collaboration. No single organization can solve this alone. An example of collaboration in action is the Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP), a global alliance that has the objective of promoting sustainable rice farming and empowering smallholder farmers. Mars Food & Nutrition is proud to be a founding member.
