The fourth and final jar
Marmite has just put out the fourth and last in its limited-edition Pride jar series with the Elton John AIDS Foundation. The 2025 jar is themed around I’m Still Standing, Elton’s 1983 single, and it carries off the run with the strongest design of the four.
The series went: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (2023, for the album’s 50th anniversary), Rocketman (2024, for the film), Dodger Stadium 1975 (2024 second-half), and now I’m Still Standing (2025). Four jars, four references to landmark Elton moments, three years and a bit of running.
The money
This is the bit that genuinely matters. Across the four-year partnership, Marmite has paid the Elton John AIDS Foundation one million pounds. Unconditionally. Meaning not “ten pence per jar”, not “matched to sales”, but a flat million quid as a charitable donation, contractually unrelated to whether the jars sold one unit or a million units.
That is unusual for a brand collaboration. Most “buy this jar, we donate” campaigns are structured so that the brand mostly profits and the charity mostly waits. Marmite’s structure here is the opposite: the money flows whether the jars sell or not. The jars themselves are the visibility, and the visibility funds the awareness, but the headline donation is decoupled from the till.
EJAF do the prevention, testing, treatment, and support work that the NHS and equivalents around the world cannot or do not. One million pounds is real money to them. Worth saying clearly.
The jar itself
Design-wise, the I’m Still Standing jar is the best of the four. The label leans into rainbow colour blocks behind a stylised piano-key motif and the song title in a slightly hand-drawn serif. Less literal than the Yellow Brick Road one, less photo-referential than the Rocketman one. Better than the Dodger Stadium one, which was busy. This one feels confident.
It is the same Marmite inside (do not be a Marmite snob about limited-edition jars, the contents are the contents), three quid, available at all the main supermarkets. Collector’s market will push the price up within a year. Buy one to use, buy a second for the cupboard.
The art installation
Worth flagging separately: Marmite have done a thing at Eccleston Yards in London with the artist Ashton Attzs called We’re Still Standing, a large-scale piece built around real personal stories of people EJAF has supported. It is up through Pride season. If you are in the area, go and see it. It is more substantial than the brand-tie-in PR usually warrants.
What the partnership leaves behind
Three things, in rough order of importance.
The million for EJAF, paid in cash, no strings, no quarterly KPI gating. Real impact, in real lives.
A four-year visible association between a heritage food brand and a long-standing LGBTQ+ charity, in an era where that association is not safe ground for every brand and where some have quietly retreated from it. Marmite did not retreat. Credit.
And four genuinely good jars in collectors’ kitchens, which will be on eBay listings for the next twenty years and will keep the partnership alive in small private conversations about what the labels meant.
For a brand campaign, that is a properly good legacy.
Source: Marmite × Elton John AIDS Foundation press, June 2025; ejaf.org for the Foundation’s work.
