Mars, Incorporated: Building organisational resilience in a world of mixed signals
For Mars, organisational resilience runs through strategy, sourcing, governance, scenario planning and digital infrastructure. Group CFO Claus Aagaard explains how the company has gradually turned resilience into an operational discipline over time and why the CFO must help drive the agenda far beyond finance.
Mars, Incorporated is one of the largest privately held companies in the United States. The family-owned business generates more than $65 billion in annual revenue and operates across confectionery, pet care and food. Its portfolio includes some of the world’s most recognisable brands from M&M’s, Snickers and Mars bars to Pedigree, Royal Canin and Whiskas and more the 2,500 veterinary hospitals.
With more than a century of history and a global presence spanning dozens of markets, Mars tends to think in decades rather than quarters. That long horizon shapes investment, growth and risk. But it does not make the business immune to shocks. Over the past decade, Mars has faced several moments that tested its resilience. The NotPetya cyberattack in 2017 disrupted parts of the company’s operations and became an early reminder of how vulnerable global systems can be. A few years later, the COVID-19 pandemic forced changes across supply chains, mobility patterns and consumer behaviour worldwide. Since then, the global environment has added new layers of uncertainty for companies operating internationally.
“Managing organisational resilience still starts with reading classic market signals such as consumers, retailers and category development,”
- says Claus Aagaard, Group CFO at Mars.
“But on top of that, we also have to interpret a much broader set of signals shaped by geopolitics, sanctions, trade conflicts and a more fragmented global environment. For many years, we lived in this wonderful era of expansion and harmonisation. That reality is gone. Now we need to understand what a more multipolar world actually means for our respective businesses. At the highest level this starts with looking at strategy and the Enterprise Risk Management process together. This has become much more dynamic the last few years.”
Expanding the lens on risk and sourcing
At Mars, the response to rising uncertainty has been to integrate resilience more closely with strategy and operational choices.
Mars is, for instance, analysing its raw material sourcing in far greater detail than before. As an agriculture-based consumer goods company, much of its production depends on ingredients that are sourced globally but processed and sold locally. In the past, the focus was largely on avoiding dependence on a single supplier. Today, the analysis goes further.
“We used to say we cannot be sole-sourced from one supplier. Now, we also look at whether we are too dependent on one country or one geography, because there may be sanctions, trade conflicts or other developments. So, we analyse where we have alternatives and where we need to build them,” says Claus Aagaard.
Mars has also become more systematic in using scenario planning and stress testing, particularly after the experience of COVID. Rather than trying to predict one precise outcome, the focus is increasingly on preparing options and understanding how the business would respond under different conditions.
“I cannot sit here and say that we are building a specific competitive advantage for navigating wherever geopolitics takes the world. But we can be thoughtful about how we position ourselves,” says Claus Aagaard. “One way to think about it is to ask, where are we long and where are we short in our investments, and does that match where we believe the opportunities will be? At the same time, we want to keep investing in areas that are poised for growth, whether that is India, China, Africa, Southeast Asia or parts of Latin America. If you decide to retrench and only be a Western company, then there are not that many people left for you to serve.”
Another lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic was that resilience does not only come from systems and planning, but also from relationships built over time with employees, suppliers and partners.
“The way we engage our associates, the way we engage our suppliers and the contracts we have in place gave us a lot of resilience during COVID," says Claus Aagaard. “It is about how we treat people and the ecosystem around us, sustainability in a broad sense. This is central in our Mutuality Principle. Many companies struggled more during COVID because they had not built the same level of robustness over time.”
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Avoiding one-way decisions
Balancing resilience with financial performance is often framed as a trade-off between short-term results and long-term stability. At Mars, Claus Aagaard does not fully accept that premise. In his view, the starting point is to stay anchored in the company’s purpose and strategy and then allocate resources in a way that supports both growth and resilience. That sometimes means accepting short-term financial pressure to protect long-term business strength. But it also requires discipline. If margins erode too far, investment and innovation will inevitably suffer, potentially creating a negative spiral.
To navigate that balance, Mars has introduced ways of keeping strategic decisions flexible. During the COVID-19 period, the company developed what Claus Aagaard calls the “double door” approach. The idea is to favour decisions that can be reversed if circumstances change, rather than locking the company into a single irreversible path.
“It is named after the swinging doors in a saloon. If we realise we got something wrong, we can simply walk back through the door again. Of course, it does not always work like that in practice, but philosophically it means we try to avoid one-way decisions when a situation is uncertain – which is increasingly often the case.”
That flexibility is also supported by Mars’ ownership structure. As a private company, Mars can sometimes accept a temporary hit to profits rather than react immediately to short-term pressures.
Technology strengthens the operational backbone
Much of the resilience work at Mars happens deep inside the operational systems that support the business. Over the past decade, Mars has invested heavily in digital tools, analytics and cyber security to strengthen its ability to detect risks and respond faster. One focus area has been data. Access to data across the organisation has expanded significantly, while the finance function has built stronger analytical capabilities and implemented newer planning systems that allow more advanced scenario modelling. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mars’ teams also developed AI-based forecasting tools to address specific operational challenges. One example was chewing gum sales, which fluctuate heavily with mobility patterns.
“We developed what we called super-forecasting models to help us understand what was actually happening,” says Claus Aagaard. “We used them on specific questions where traditional forecasting simply did not work anymore.”
Cyber resilience has become another major priority. Like most large companies, Mars faces constant attempts to penetrate its digital infrastructure and has therefore strengthened its protection systems and introduced additional safeguards. Among them is the ability to isolate parts of the company’s global systems if a cyberattack occurs, preventing disruptions from spreading across the entire organisation.
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A broader role for the modern CFO
While resilience touches almost every part of the organisation, Claus Aagaard believes the CFO is uniquely positioned to help drive the agenda. Not because finance owns the topic, but because the function sits at the intersection of strategy, operations and performance.
“As CFO, my job is first and foremost to help the CEO and my colleagues who run the businesses. Finance gives you a powerful lens on the organisation, but if you want to be effective you have to understand how the whole business actually works,” he says.
“The scope of the CFO role is as broad as you want to make it. You may not have decision rights everywhere, but you absolutely have an understanding right.”
In a business environment where signals are harder to interpret than before, that perspective can be valuable.
“The CFO cannot solve everything,” Claus Aagaard says. “But we can help connect the dots across the business and sometimes provoke a discussion when it is needed.”
Claus Aagaard's advice to fellow CFOs
About Mars, Incorporated
Mars, Incorporated is a global, family-owned company operating across pet care, veterinary services, snacking and food. Founded in 1911, the company generates more than $65 billion in annual revenue and employs over 170,000 people worldwide. Its portfolio includes some of the world’s best-known brands such as ROYAL CANIN®, PEDIGREE®, WHISKAS®, M&M’S®, SNICKERS®, Pringles® and BEN’S ORIGINAL™. Mars also operates a global network of veterinary services, including BANFIELD™, BLUEPEARL™, VCA™ and ANICURA™, as well as the diagnostics business ANTECH®.
