With Mary’s Meals, a new step in Clarins’ commitment to children

Childhood

Commitments

In 2011, Clarins launched its first initiatives to fight child malnutrition. Since then, our support has resulted in the distribution of over 41 million school meals to the most deprived. 2024 marks a new step! We are proud to officially announce that we have entered into a new partnership with Mary’s Meal, a major international charity.

Introducing Mary’s Meals

Since its founding in 2002, Mary’s Meals has become one of the world’s foremost school-feeding charities, supplying meals every school day to children living in the world’s poorest regions. The food provided encourages children to continue their education and have hope for a brighter future. With the school-feeding programme now operating in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Mary’s Meals supports the nutrition and education of more than 2.4 million children every school day.

“Our aim is to provide more than 3 million meals each year, through our partnership with Clarins and Mary’s Meals.”

In 1992, as the Bosnian war was at its height, a young Scotsman, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, decided to take action and organise humanitarian convoys to the war-torn country. He created his first association, SIR (Scottish International Relief,) which quickly grew and extended its operations to Romania, Liberia, Bosnia and Croatia.

In 2002, an encounter in Malawi with Emma, a mother of six children on the brink of dying of AIDS, profoundly affected him. Her eldest son, Edward, said to him: “I want to have enough to eat and go to school one day”. A short time later, SIR became Mary’s Meals. The new charity was founded on a very simple principle: “provide hungry children with a daily meal in their place of learning”.

The charity’s operations expanded rapidly: in 2010, 400,000 children received Mary’s Meals school meals every day. This rose to 700,000 in 2012 and the milestone millionth child was reached in 2018. By 2023, there were over 2.4 million, in 4,750 schools across 18 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and South America.

Clarins x Mary’s Meals

Mary’s Meals is an independent organisation and,until now, has not had a global commercial partner. We are therefore very proud to join forces with them, to help in the fight against hunger, malnutrition and children’s lack of schooling across the world. Clarins involvement with Mary’s Meals starts at the beginning of 2024 with a financing mechanism linked to the purchase of our products, through targeted operations in all our subsidiaries worldwide.

In concrete terms, Clarins partnership with Mary’s Meals involves an extremely simple financing mechanism for school meals. It is based on the idea of involving our customers by linking their purchases to a charitable action they can be proud of. When they buy Clarins products, it gives them pleasure, but it also generates a financial contribution from Clarins.

When they spend over a certain amount on Clarins products, the client receives a beauty purse or Mary’s Meals bag containing complementary trial sizes.
With every beauty purse or bag given, Clarins funds 10 Mary’s Meals school meals.

The mechanism starts at the beginning of 2024 and will be applied to all our subsidiaries globally, during special widely advertised operations.

Clarins and children: ongoing support for over twenty years

With 41 million school meals funded since 2011, Clarins is committed to feeding the most vulnerable children, thus offering them a brighter future. Today, there are 47 associations working for children that Clarins supports globally. Among the most emblematic are:

The Clarins Award for Children’s Rights which supports remarkable women who work for the cause of children. With a presence in 14 countries, it provides support to over 90 associations and 60,000 children in four continents since its creation.
In Canada, Le Mois des câlins which assists and supports children in hospital.