ESG Topics A-Z
Animal welfare
To PepsiCo:
PepsiCo believes in the ethical and humane treatment of animals. We have the responsibility to meet the expectations of our consumers, customers and stakeholders to strive for high standards of animal welfare.
To the World:
Animals deserve a life free from physical and mental suffering. This means the adoption of high standards of animal husbandry, transportation and slaughter.
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:
- Freedom from hunger and thirst
- Freedom from discomfort
- Freedom from pain, injury, or disease
- Freedom to express normal behavior
- Freedom from fear and distress
As a major beverages and convenient foods 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 PepsiCo suppliers 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 U.S. 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.
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 spend.1 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 market.2 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.
Our market teams have plans in place to transition to 100% cage-free by the end of 2025 or sooner. For example, the procurement team in Canada, our second-largest egg buying market after the United States, has been working with their egg supplier and expects to make the transition to cage-free by the end of 2024. In other markets, different tactics are supporting the transition. For example, we are reformulating recipes to reduce the amount of egg ingredients we procure, and re-evaluating our supply chain, identifying new egg suppliers as necessary. We plan to continue reporting annually on our progress here as we work towards our 2025 goal.
2Total market size (as measured in U.S. dollars) derived from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s crops and livestock products dataset using global 2021 data (the most recent available at time of publication) and PepsiCo’s 2022 global procurement data.
Last updated
December 19, 2023