Mars Moves to Keep Snacks Visible When AI Does the Shopping

Mars expects AI shopping assistants to take over more of the weekly grocery run — and it is rebuilding its commerce operation around that assumption before it fully arrives.

The company, which owns Dove chocolate, M&Ms and Pop-Tarts, based its planning on a recent future of shopping and retail report it produced with Kantar and Synthesis. Neil Reynolds, global chief customer officer at Mars, does not expect AI to kill the in-store checkout lane, but he does expect agentic shopping assistants (software agents that complete purchases on a consumer's behalf) to claim a growing share of routine trips. That shift threatens the checkout-lane impulse purchase that has long driven snack sales.

What is Mars actually doing?

Reynolds described a two-track road map. "How do we make sure our brands are discoverable by the LLMs and how do we make sure that once those brands are discovered, that they convert through to purchase?" he said. The second track pushes the other way: building experiential, immersive retail destinations so physical stores become places for discovery and entertainment rather than pure transactions.

On the first track, Mars is still in measurement mode. "The first thing we're trying to do is sort of get some real data around what's the start point for how our categories and how our brands show up," Reynolds said. The company is partnering with emerging tech companies to learn what data large language models (the AI systems behind tools like ChatGPT) surface about its brands and where that data comes from.

Internally, Mars is reorganizing into what it calls One Demand performance squads — teams that put the brand manager next to the insights person, the key account manager, the category manager and the agency partner.

What changed with Publicis?

Last summer, Mars hired Publicis to lead its connected commerce capabilities, expanding beyond the media and creative scope of its previous agency relationships. "Winning this consumer journey through effortless, personalized and experiential, will be within the Publicis functionality or contract as well now," Reynolds said. Publicis also brings connected ID (a data-matching capability that links consumer identities across channels), which Mars can use to build personalized shopper experiences.

How do retailers fit in?

Mars is widening its retailer conversations beyond the traditional salesperson-to-buyer meeting. "Why is our data team not talking to the data team at Walmart?" Reynolds said. The company holds ongoing "store of the future initiatives" discussions with leading retailers on making snacking aisles more immersive in their stores.

The caveat is scale of evidence: Mars is still gathering baseline data on how its brands appear inside AI systems, and no results have been disclosed. What is clear is the direction — a snack giant preparing to negotiate with algorithms as aggressively as it once did with shelf buyers.