How PepsiCo is equipping industry partners with tools to help lower emissions

Scope 3 emissions aren’t a topic most people spend time thinking about — unless you’re Roberta Barbieri, Vice President for Global Sustainability at PepsiCo. She spends every day thinking about how the company can reduce its carbon footprint and build a more sustainable business. It’s a complex job, with many different facets. But what really keeps her up at night is Scope 3 — emissions generated by the partners in PepsiCo’s supply chain.

When you think about how many thousands of partners are in that supply chain — touching more than 200 countries and territories around the world — it’s not surprising those emissions account for 94% of the company’s carbon footprint.

“If we want to achieve emissions reduction, we’re going to need creative solutions to the Scope 3 problem,” Roberta explains.

That’s where a deceptively simple concept like an online platform comes into play.

Earlier this year, PepsiCo launched the Sustainability Action Center to help contract manufacturers, suppliers and bottling partners set and track emissions reduction targets. The tool is designed to be user friendly, with a customized dashboard that lets companies stay up to date on pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) ambitions, track their own goals, measure how their progress compares to peers, and view a tailored database of playbooks and programs.

“Our partners must play a role in our pep+ progress, but we can’t simply tell these companies to lower their emissions. We understand this is a big shift,” Roberta says. “We are learning a lot from our own transformation, and we want to bring that knowledge to the table to help support others.”

The platform is already benefiting partners like Cargill, a leading global agricultural supplier that provides PepsiCo with ingredients such as corn, soybean oil and cocoa.

“You can’t improve something unless you set goals and monitor your progress toward them,” says Gurneesh Bhandal, Customer Sustainability Leader for Global Partners at Cargill. Using the platform has helped Gurneesh and her team better understand how Cargill’s performance in key sustainability metrics compares to PepsiCo’s and identify any gaps.

“The platform does a really good job of addressing one of the biggest challenges companies face when trying to become more sustainable, which is that there are so many different approaches and definitions of success,” says Juan Jose Gonzalez, European Account Director for Smurfit Westrock, a leading paper-based packaging provider that supplies PepsiCo with much of its food packaging in Europe. “Having these resources organized in one central location is incredibly valuable.”

The Sustainability Action Center is PepsiCo’s latest offering to support its partners, building on the work done by initiatives such as the pep+ Partners for Tomorrow customer platform and pep+ REnew, which helps suppliers adopt renewable energy. When you put it all together, these programs add up to a continued aim to collaborate with partners on shared sustainability goals.

“Opening these lines of communication is so important, because the climate challenges we all face are vast,” Gurneesh says. “For us to really move the needle and make the impact we want to make on a global scale, we need to collaborate. Only then will we see a change.”