• by Sarah Mahoney , Staff Writer, October 2, 2026

 
With the New York Yankees pushing deeper into October baseball, Mars’ Ben’s Original has punned its way into a winning double play: making more baseball fans aware of Ben’s Rice and generating 500,000 meals for a good cause.

The company’s partnership with slugger Ben Rice started early in the season -- Ben Rice and Ben’s Original puns were inevitable -- as the brand began making donations to No Kid Hungry, inspired by Rice's biggest moments on the field.

“For a category-leading brand, the job is always to recruit new consumers, and sometimes you find opportunities where you get to tap into a network of potential consumers that you're not going to organically reach in another way,” says Drew Brinckerhoff, vice president of marketing, Mars Food & Nutrition, North America.

“Ben Rice had this trend going on in social media that we picked up on, and it was this perfect overlap of an audience that we don't normally get great access to.”

Initially, the brand kicked off the partnership with a donation of 22,000 meals through No Kid Hungry. (Rice wears a No. 22 jersey.) Additional donations followed throughout the season, inspired by his on-field performance.

Rice obliged by delivering a season for the record books: With 43 home runs so far, he’s currently fourth in the American League. That allowed the partnership to end the season with 500,000 meals.

Brinckerhoff tells CPG Insider he was surprised at how quickly a Rice-starring GIF -- which showed him eating from a bowl held in his mitt, using the “feed me” motions that have become so familiar to fans -- took off. “Consumers were interacting with that GIF about 10,000 times a day. That feels like we've really tapped into this partnership in the right way, to continue to drive relevance for the baseball consumer.”

That process meant trying to focus on a consumer mindset. Because baseball is a summer sport, people are thinking about grilling, not about rice. “So how do we access more of those meal occasions and establish that relevance for rice in this time window? Well, we can tap into the things they are thinking about, and obviously baseball is one of them,” Brinckerhoff says.

While there are plenty of great food charities -- and Mars already worked with some of them -- No Kid Hungry made particular sense for this effort. “What really attracted us to it was that we could do more than just donate meals. No Kid Hungry gets into policies and school systems and tries to influence beyond simply donating. We want better food today for a better world tomorrow, and No Kid Hungry can help us deliver that.”

Mars worked with Golin Ketchum on the campaign.