Stakeholder engagement

Why it matters

Approach

We define our key stakeholder groups as those who impact — directly or indirectly — our business success, or who are impacted by our operations. The insights and support that we receive from key stakeholder groups and platforms are critical to how we develop, implement and evolve our business and sustainability agenda. We value the collaboration and close partnership with a broad range of organizations to help us identify emerging risks and opportunities, prioritize and scale our efforts and create long-lasting value for our company and society.

We solicit feedback from and work with stakeholders through a variety of mechanisms. The following list summarizes our key stakeholder groups, how they relate to PepsiCo, how we engage with them and their topics of interest. It is not exhaustive, but it provides examples of our process. For additional information about our engagement with shareholders and other stakeholders, please see pages 39-41 of our 2025 Proxy Statement.

Investors

Importance to PepsiCo

Regular, transparent communication with our shareholders and other investors is essential to PepsiCo’s long-term success. As providers of capital, investors support our ability to finance new projects and advance the future of our business.

How we engage

We engage with our shareholders and other stakeholders year-round in a variety of ways:

• Our investor relations team regularly meets with shareholders, prospective shareholders and investment analysts. As appropriate, these meetings include our Chairman of the Board and CEO and Chief Financial Officer.
• During the two-month period before the Annual Meeting of Shareholders, we generally contact our 75 largest shareholders, offering to discuss a broad range of topics.
• Subsequent to the Annual Meeting of Shareholders, we continue our outreach efforts to develop a better understanding of the feedback received from shareholders and issues important to our shareholders.
• As reflected in our Corporate Governance Guidelines, the Presiding Director of the Board is available for consultation and direct communication, if requested by major shareholders. Our engagement program also involves other directors, as well as senior executives and employees from many different parts of the company, including from communications, investor relations, executive compensation, compliance and ethics, legal, public policy and government affairs, and sustainability teams.

Key matters of interest

Investor engagement is generally focused on our portfolio strategy, financial and operating performance and capital allocation. Members of our management team also regularly engage with shareholders to discuss our sustainability strategy and initiatives, human capital management, company culture, inclusion, corporate governance, and executive compensation practices, and to solicit feedback on these and a variety of other topics of interest.

NGOs

Importance to PepsiCo

NGOs help identify key issues, represent the views of affected stakeholders and provide guidance on how we should take action to address concerns, advocate for preferred policy outcomes and advance efforts. The NGOs we engage express opinions on a wide range of topics and we consider their expertise and perspective as we craft our approach to key issues.

How we engage

PepsiCo maintains both direct and collective dialogue with leading local, national and global NGOs. We do so both as part of an ongoing effort to build knowledge and maintain relationships as well as to meaningfully contribute to specific events or activities. Direct engagement with NGOs includes contributing funding to projects of mutual interest, providing thought leadership, helping develop policy positions, asking for feedback and advice on certain topics to advance our pep+ agenda and monitoring their reports and campaigns for insights that can help shape our strategies as well as help catalyze action.

In addition, we regularly meet with diverse stakeholder groups, often in collaboration with leading non-profit groups that bring together investors, non-governmental organizations and businesses in support of sustainability and public health.

Key matters of interest

NGO interests range from topic- or geographically-specific issues, to broader global and cross-cutting sustainability issues. These include such topics as climate change, water scarcity, packaging, nutrition, public health, inclusion, human rights and other environmental matters related to PepsiCo’s supply chain, sustainable agriculture, sustainability reporting and various other issues.

Consumers

Importance to PepsiCo

Consumer demand drives the sale of our products. We strive to create joyful moments and nourishment through our products and brand experiences. By aligning our product portfolio with consumer needs and preferences, we can strengthen our competitive positioning and continue to deliver our mission to Create More Smiles with Every Sip and Every Bite.

How we engage

We engage with our consumers through a number of channels that help us to understand their needs and interests, as well as share information about our product portfolio and company. These include market research, advertising and marketing, social media and company communications, including sustainability reporting and consumer-centric content on our website.

Key matters of interest

Since creating a sustainable future for the planet and society continues to be important for consumers, we too have worked towards further integrating our business plans with our sustainability agenda to aim to satisfy and encourage these demands. Nutrition, Packaging, Product labeling and claims and Product safety and quality continue to be key areas of interest.

Industry and peers

Importance to PepsiCo

As a global company, we understand that our voice and scale can add to the momentum of certain initiatives, but that progress is often best achieved when multiple organizations join together. When we work with our peers to build consensus on global and local topics, we can create collective momentum, scale and increased impact.

How we engage

We engage with our peers through forums, industry associations, multi-stakeholder platforms, charters, pledges, initiatives and more in order to participate in pre-competitive collaboration. PepsiCo supports a variety of initiatives that promote sustainability and allow us to support holistic solutions to systemic challenges that we cannot overcome alone. Examples of these collaborations include the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), on which we hold multiple leadership positions from our CEO co-chairing CGF and members of PepsiCo’s Sustainability Office holding chair positions for both CGF’s Forest Positive Coalition and its Climate Transition Coalition. We also collaborate on the World Economic Forum. Alongside industry representatives or NGOs, we participate in working groups, sit on advisory boards of industry associations or participate in events and activities to raise issues, discuss them from our respective vantage points and collaborate on developing solutions or deepening our collective understanding of an issue. Furthermore, we sometimes collaborate to advocate for desired policy outcomes. For further information, see Endorsement of multistakeholder principles and initiatives.

Key matters of interest

Leveraging the knowledge and the opportunity to scale initiatives through collaborations with our peers allows us to become Faster, Stronger and Better and provides the opportunity for us to encourage our peers to help drive change for shared, systemic global challenges. Together, we are working to create large-scale changes in areas that we view as important.

Customers

Importance to PepsiCo

Our customers are the conduit through which we distribute and sell our products to consumers globally. Maintaining strong relationships with customers helps us to make our products accessible to consumers, delivering more smiles and strengthening our business.

How we engage

We engage with customers through a number of channels that range from regular commercial dialogue and initiatives to collaboration on shared sustainability ambitions. Engagement can be undertaken directly or through broader participation with industry groups, NGOs or customer-led initiatives.

Key matters of interest

As consumer preferences and habits change, we are focused on pivoting our resources to provide first-class service levels, driving game-changing innovation and delivering mutual value creation unmatched in our industry.

Our customers are key players in the food system, with influence downstream to their consumers and upstream to their suppliers. Addressing global sustainability challenges requires collaboration along the value chain, making customers essential partners in our pep+ journey. Many of our customers have ambitious sustainability goals of their own and face local regulatory and reputational pressures to improve their social and environmental performance. By working to address key sustainability issues like climate change, water stewardship, nutrition and packaging, we can help our customers to meet their own objectives and collectively contribute to a more sustainable food system.

Suppliers

Importance to PepsiCo

Our suppliers are a critical link within our value chain, providing the ingredients, materials and services needed to make our products. With their support, we are striving to create a more sustainable food system.

How we engage

We expect our suppliers to adhere to the same standards of integrity to which we hold ourselves. We aim to respect the fundamental human rights of all workers and communities in our operations and supply chain. To help ensure we are positioned to prevent, identify and address potential risks and impacts, we established a global human rights approach that is guided by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Suppliers of goods and services who do business with PepsiCo entities worldwide are expected to adhere to the principles outlined in our Supplier Code of Conduct (SCoC) and all other relevant policies.

In select purchasing categories in scope for our sustainable sourcing ambitions, such as palm oil, our procurement teams use tools such as supplier scorecards to evaluate and compare performance of individual suppliers against our expectations. In cases where we identify potentially high risk or priority supply chain concerns, we work to deploy specific programs to improve knowledge, awareness, and outcomes.

We have identified our top global GHG-emitting agriculture and packaging tier-1 suppliers and launched the Leader Ladder Framework to monitor and track progress. The Leader Ladder positions suppliers within different phases on their sustainability journey: Initiating, Engaging, Progressing, Accelerating and Leader. This framework allows PepsiCo to meet suppliers where they are on the journey, and provides insights on where we can collaborate and where further support and development of capability-building programs is needed.

Key matters of interest

Engagement with suppliers centers around a number of topics of mutual interest. Examples of these include agriculture and packaging, ethical conduct, health and safety, alignment with pep+ and environmental stewardship.

Employees

Importance to PepsiCo

PepsiCo believes that human capital management, including attracting, developing and retaining a high-quality workforce, is critical to our long-term success. We strive to engage our employees and create meaningful opportunities to work, gain new skills and build successful careers while building an inclusive workplace.

How we engage

In addition to informal engagement with teammates and managers, we have established various mechanisms designed to encourage PepsiCo employees to Voice Opinions Fearlessly. Each of these channels is designed to provide the opportunity to speak up, sharing feedback with those empowered to address it. They include an annual Organizational Health Survey (OHS), our periodic Employee Confidence Index pulse check and Life Cycle Surveys, conducted at key moments in employees’ tenure with the company. In 2024, 84% of employees worldwide voiced their opinion through the OHS.

PepsiCo strives to maintain positive working relationships with union representatives. In 2024, approximately 48% of employees worldwide, eligible to be covered under collective bargaining agreements, were represented.

For more information on how we engage our employees, see Employee engagement.

Key matters of interest

Protecting the sense of belonging and well-being of our employees worldwide is one of PepsiCo’s top priorities. Providing a culture of inclusion is a key way we can support our employees' sense of belonging, enhance our ability to attract and retain talent and strengthen our reputation. We also aim to encourage the continued growth and development of our employees and support meaningful careers, which is done through our attraction, retention and advancement strategy as well as our internal career development platform, which provides access to various trainings, guidance and activities. We want to sustain a high-caliber pipeline of talent.

Our 2024 internal survey results show that PepsiCo employees feel high levels of pride in working for PepsiCo, are energized by their work and are confident in PepsiCo’s future success. PepsiCo’s OHS Score stood at 78% with employee engagement at 80% and employee commitment at 76%. External benchmarking suggests that our employee engagement remains strong compared with other Fortune 500 peers. By listening to employees through various channels and to solve issues raised, we aim to provide the best employment experience possible.

Governments

Importance to PepsiCo

PepsiCo’s business is affected by public policy at the local, state, national, regional, and global levels. Through public policy engagement, our objective is to promote a business environment that supports PepsiCo's ability to achieve sustainable growth in the years ahead and create beneficial outcomes for stakeholders.

How we engage

We are a member of numerous industry associations, trade groups and business or multi-stakeholder coalitions. PepsiCo works with groups that represent the food and beverage industry and the business community or engage on issues that are critical to PepsiCo’s business and its stakeholders. Importantly, such organizations help develop consensus among varied interests. For more detail on our approach, see Public policy engagement, political activities and contribution guidelines.

Key matters of interest

We participate in public policy dialogues and share our expertise on key issues that support our business strategy and where we, or others, have identified that we can contribute ideas to solve policy issues. We aim to make constructive contributions that will lead to policies that help our business and our consumers thrive in a sustainable fashion. In 2024, our key issues included agriculture, discriminatory taxation, trade, commodities, restrictions in the marketplace, food security, health and nutrition, packaging, environmental sustainability and artificial intelligence.

Communities

Importance to PepsiCo

We aim to support positive change for people and the planet by collaborating with local stakeholders and investing in solutions to help communities thrive.

How we engage

We are working to source crops and ingredients in ways that accelerate the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices and strengthen farming communities. We have set a goal to improve the livelihoods of more than 250,000 people in our agricultural supply chain and supporting communities by 2030 through measurable improvements in economic prosperity and farmer and farm worker security¹. In pursuit of this goal and our broader Positive Agriculture agenda, we are working to help address systemic issues facing communities and ecosystems in priority landscapes, including those related to deforestation and economic viability.

In addition, through strategic partnerships and programs globally, the PepsiCo Foundation seeks to tackle the long-term challenges facing the global food system in a manner that does the most good for the most people. PepsiCo strives for tangible impact in the places where we live and work — collaborating with industry peers, local and international organizations and our employees to effect large-scale change in the spaces that matter to us and on issues of global importance.

Key matters of interest

Our philanthropic work focuses on supporting the essential elements of a sustainable food system:

• Targeting short- and long-term solutions to provide food security through our Food for Good initiative;
• Investing to address the safe water access needs of local communities where we operate;
• Supporting sustainable farming practices to strengthen agricultural communities;
• Offering workforce development programs to enhance economic opportunities; and
• Helping provide communities with the support they need to manage through unpredictable times and build pathways to prosperity. In markets where we operate, our approach is customized to meet local needs.

The PepsiCo Foundation aims to feed potential for people in our communities by supporting access to nutritious food, safe water and economic opportunity. In 2024, the PepsiCo Foundation:

• Delivered 8.8 million meals to over 220,000 individuals;
• Reached over 1.9 million farmers and their communities with economic empowerment training and resources;
• Helped provide more than 1.2 million people with access to clean water;
• Awarded 1,700 scholarships to underserved students; and
• Supported 100 small businesses across the U.S.

Grievance mechanisms

We maintain grievance mechanisms as a means for stakeholders to raise concerns. Speak Up is a toll-free ethics hotline operated by an independent third-party that provides PepsiCo employees, consumers, suppliers and business partners and community members with a 24/7, anonymous and confidential means of reporting suspected Code of Conduct (the Code) violations.

Our dedicated agricultural grievance mechanism complements Speak Up, enabling third parties to raise concerns regarding adherence to our environmental and social policies within our agricultural supply chain.

All employees have an obligation to report what they suspect to be a violation of the Code, our values and policies or applicable law and can do so through any of the following channels:

• Their supervisor, manager or next level manager,
• A Human Resources manager,
• The GC&E Department,
• The PepsiCo Law Department and
• The Speak Up hotline available by phone, mobile device or online.

¹This goal captures the number of livelihoods reached through an outcome-focused evaluation measuring improvements in economic prosperity and farmer and farm worker security. Metric counts the cumulative people impacted since 2021