Mars wants to sell more chocolate in Southeast Asia—and that means dealing with extreme heat and consumers who ‘want content every minute’

Average temperatures in cities like Manila and Bangkok routinely break 100 degrees Fahrenheit and over 75% humidity in the middle of summer. 

So what do you do when your key product is something that melts? It’s a problem Mars Wrigley, the producer of snacks like Mars and Snickers chocolate bars, has to deal with.  

Mars needs to make sure “the experience of Snickers is the same, even if you’re in a Tesco [a U.K. supermarket chain], or a mom-and-pop store in Vietnam,” says Kalpesh Parmar, the general manager for Mars Wrigley Asia. He says the company is working with retailers, providing chillers to keep chocolates fresh. And there’s technological solutions too, with Mars working towards developing heat-resistant chocolate. (Mars patented a process that replaces cocoa butter, which normally has a melting point of 37 degrees Celsius, with a sugar replacer with a higher melting point)

The treats and snacks category in Asia (excluding China, Japan, and India) is worth about $32 billion and continues to grow, Parmar estimates. The region is key to Mars’s goal of doubling the annual revenue of its snacking division to $36 billion in the next decade. 

Mars is targeting the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia as growth markets. Future Market Insights, a market research firm, predicts Indonesia’s chocolate confectionery market will have a compound annual growth rate of 7.2% through 2034, thanks to continued urbanization and exposure to Western lifestyles. 

Mars needs to be fast to win over consumers. Shoppers in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam “want content every minute, every hour,” on live-shopping and e-commerce platforms, Parmar says—and they don’t care if the content is well-produced.

Yet Mars isn’t ignoring more traditional retail channels. Consumers are also shopping more at small businesses, which tend to be closer to residential areas than larger supermarkets. 

That was a surprise to Mars, which expected that stalls would slowly disappear. Instead, mom-and-pop stores carved a niche for themselves by partnering with e-commerce companies, offering fulfilment services and working with food delivery startups like Grab and Foodpanda. 

There’s a lot of opportunity for growth. Chocolate consumption in Southeast Asia is still relatively low, with many consumers seeing them as an infrequent treat. Parmar thinks the way to get the region to eat more chocolate is to sell them smaller portions—or as he terms them, “smaller packs of happiness.”