500 Tesco stores will see a change in the chocolate Mars bars' wrappers, from plastic to recyclable paper, in a UK trial.
The company, Mars Incorporated, is looking to explore different types of packaging, and how these work in everyday life. It will use feedback from the trial to inform future packaging pilots.
Mars bars' current plastic wrappers cannot be recycled, and big brands such as Mars have come under pressure from customers and campaigners to do more to help the environment.
Mars' decision follows the move by Quality Street to ditch the traditional foil and plastic wrappers for recyclable paper before last Christmas. Nestlé also announced it was switching KitKat wrappers to 80% recycled plastic, so they could be recycled at supermarkets across the UK, or put in household recycling in Ireland.
Mars said it was "exploring different types of alternative packaging solutions" for its confectionery products.
Richard Sutherland-Moore, a packaging expert at Mars Wrigley UK's research and development centre, said: "For Mars bar, the challenge was to find the right paper packaging solution with an adequate level of barrier properties to protect the chocolate whilst guaranteeing the food safety, quality and integrity of the product to prevent food waste".
Mars said it is investing hundreds of millions of pounds to redesign thousands of types of packaging, and meet its goal of reducing the use of virgin plastics by a quarter in the short-term, while also increasing its use of recycled plastic in its packaging.
Andrew Floor, a packaging development manager at Tesco, said the trial aligned with the retailer's own "strategy of removing plastic and packaging in our business where we can, reducing it where we can't, reusing more and recycling what's left".
