Approach

PepsiCo shares concerns regarding the ethical and humane treatment of animals and supports the Five Freedoms of animal welfare to support good physical and mental well-being for all animals within our direct supply chain:

1. Freedom from hunger and thirst
2. Freedom from discomfort
3. Freedom from pain, injury, or disease
4. Freedom to express normal behavior
5. Freedom from fear and distress

As a major convenient foods and beverage company, we strive for sustainable practices in all of our business areas, including animal well-being. Some products in PepsiCo's broad global portfolio use animal ingredients, for example, cheese seasonings, eggs in baked items and other products, or chicken broth. Apart from our dairy business, animal products represent a small portion of our commodity purchase volumes.

In 2020, PepsiCo consolidated its work on animal welfare into its first ever Global Policy on Animal Welfare. In it, we share our focus on, and approach to managing relevant issues in our supply chain, including dairy cattle and broiler chicken welfare, cage-free eggs and animal testing.

Working closely with our suppliers and other stakeholders is vitally important to improving animal welfare in our global supply chains. Many of the animal ingredients we purchase do not come directly from farmers, which makes suppliers key partners to driving improvements. All suppliers to PepsiCo are held to the standards set in our Global Supplier Code of Conduct and are urged to support the principles laid out in our Global Policy on Animal Welfare.

We have set goals to work with our partners toward sourcing 100% cage-free eggs in the US by the end of 2020 and global markets by the end of 2025. We aim to achieve this by reformulating certain products to incorporate egg-substitute ingredients and transitioning to cage-free egg suppliers.

Progress

We continue to work with suppliers to support compliance with the standards set out in our Global Policy on Animal Welfare is met.

Pursuing our pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) ambitions means that we focus our efforts on the areas where our ability to drive systemic change is the greatest. This includes, among other areas, helping to spread regenerative agriculture practices across 7 million acres, approximately equal to our entire agricultural footprint. For more information, see Agriculture. Our sustainability materiality assessments help us to prioritize these efforts.

Cage-free eggs

Our 2022 cage-free egg procurement was approximately 50% of our total global egg spend¹. Since 2020, all egg ingredients purchased in the United States have been derived from 100% cage-free chickens, and in 2022 in Europe, approximately 95% of purchased egg ingredients (by spend) was sourced from cage-free chickens.

Based on available statistics, we estimate that our egg procurement represents a fraction of a percent (approximately 0.003%) of the global egg market². In 2022, PepsiCo’s procurement of eggs and egg products (such as powders, liquids and albumen protein) represented less than 0.1% of the company’s total agricultural procurement.

We will continue to work to drive progress on this issue and plan to report annually as part of our ESG Topics A-Z update as we work towards our goal of 100% cage free eggs by the end of 2025.