David Smith

Mars Inc. may be most famous for its candy bars, but perhaps less well-known is that the global food giant is also a leader in coral reef restoration. The company has planted more than 1.3 million corals over the last 15 years. And as its chief marine scientist, David Smith has been tasked with making sure those coral projects are backed by sound science. 

“It’s a bit of a brave move to get somebody with a conservation background asking quite strong and pointed questions on whether they are doing everything they need to be sustainable,” says Smith of the company. As a trained marine biologist, he is all too aware of how climate change imperils the world’s coral by warming the oceans and triggering mass bleaching events. Indeed, scientists estimate that by 2050, 90% of the world’s coral reefs could be gone. That would be devastating for the many millions of species and human livelihoods those reefs support, and also for Mars, which relies on fish as a key ingredient in some of its Sheba brand pet foods.

With Smith’s guidance, Mars has developed and deployed a holistic approach to reef restoration focusing on relatively low-cost, scalable solutions. One of these is the reef star, a hexagonal steel structure that is coated in sand and healthy coral fragments, then attached to damaged reefs. “The reef stars are a really good modular system that can work at commercial levels of scale,” Smith says. “My input has been to figure out how to deploy them in the field to make ecological sense. What species do you use? How do you incorporate climate resilience into the restoration?”

More than 90,000 reef stars have been installed across the world so far. Recent independent research confirmed that these structures can restore damaged reefs within just four years, demonstrating that rapid recovery is possible. This is on full display at Mars’ Hope Reef off the coast of Indonesia, where coral cover has increased from 2% to 70% since restoration efforts began in 2021, and fish populations have grown by 260%. 

In 2023, Mars organized the Big Build, one of the largest single reef restoration efforts ever, where more than 100 people from various backgrounds—including businesses, NGOs, government, and local communities—collaborated to plant 30,000 corals in four days in Indonesia’s Spermonde Archipelago. “That was all about the power of partnerships to deliver restoration at a scale that's relevant to the communities in which we live,” Smith says. The company has trained close to 200 reef builders, and has 63 restoration sites across 12 countries. This year, Smith oversaw the program’s expansion into the Red Sea off Saudi Arabia, where the team is testing whether coral probiotics can help make reefs more resilient to heat. “Our goal is to provide different communities around the world with a menu of options and the ability to choose what option is best for their own unique set of environmental conditions,” he says.

Now Mars is embarking on the Big Build II, with volunteers working to plant 15,000 corals in five days in the Maldives. “It should be the natural behavior of communities that depend on reefs to rebuild it if it's damaged,” Smith says. “And these are the tools that you need to be able to deliver that.”