Product safety and quality
Last updated
August 13, 2026
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To PepsiCo:
With brands that reach consumers more than a billion times every day, we must ensure the safety and quality of the products that they enjoy. This is essential to maintain the trust of our consumers, as well as a transparent relationship with regulators and customers.
To the World:
Consumers must be able to trust and rely on the safety and quality of the products they buy. This responsibility falls to the companies who make, move and sell these products and depends on compliance with internal and industry standards as well as government requirements.
Approach
Through our operations, authorized bottlers, contract manufacturers and other third parties, we make, market, distribute and sell a wide variety of beverages and foods, serving customers and consumers in more than 200 countries and territories. Fundamental to our mission is our promise to deliver trusted brands and consumer smiles with consistent safety and high quality.
We expect that our ingredient suppliers will achieve certification to a Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI)-recognized standard, including Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) for agricultural commodities, or demonstrate equivalence through a PepsiCo pre-approval audit scheme. We continue to work with suppliers to increase the proportion of GFSI certifications worldwide. We aim to achieve or maintain GFSI certification at all PepsiCo-owned manufacturing facilities globally.
Governance
Our governance structure connects regions and global functional stakeholders and ensures robust food safety and quality oversight and controls across the enterprise. Food safety is a top priority for PepsiCo, guided by PepsiCo Food Safety & Quality Assurance (FSQA). All our employees, including frontline and site management, play an important role in ensuring compliance with standards and policies. Management reviews of performance trends, escalations and priorities take place regularly at the region level and twice a year globally. Senior executives review policy compliance, strategic priorities and mitigation of potential risks through participation in region and global Executive Product Integrity Council (EPIC) meetings two times each year. Targeted horizon scanning task forces are established to identify and manage core issues.
Design and management of systems relating to food safety and quality programs are housed within the Research and Development (R&D) function. Within R&D, the Compliance team is composed of representatives from FSQA, Scientific Affairs and Regulatory Affairs, supported with input from many other functions. Its remit is to oversee compliance with both regulation and internal standards. The Supply Chain function is embedded in segments across the business and leads the execution of programs that make, move and sell our foods and drinks. The function’s Quality Control team leads food safety and quality execution and improvement activities within operations.
In addition to closely following scientific and regulatory developments, PepsiCo actively monitors potential reputational risks related to our food and beverage portfolio (whether or not scientifically-based) through daily media (traditional and social) reporting to inform our strategy. We assess current reputational risks and incorporate predictive analytics to help inform our risk mitigation efforts. We also work with a third party to develop detailed, regular reporting to help monitor reputation among the general public on a global scale and provide both a global and market-level view of our reputational standing across a variety of factors including product quality.
Risk-based controls are fundamental to PepsiCo’s food safety management systems as well as our manufacturing and support processes and are designed to mitigate potential hazards and risks. Our products are traceable, meaning we are able to trace one step backward to identify components (i.e., ingredients, processing aids, packaging) and one step forward to identify initial point of distribution of the finished product. This enables us to quickly investigate and address any potential concerns in the marketplace.
Risk management
We actively manage risks associated with food safety. PepsiCo tracks and reviews food safety strategy and performance with its PepsiCo Risk Committee and with its Board of Directors twice annually. Food safety risks are formally reported into PepsiCo’s enterprise risk management (ERM) system twice-yearly through structured risk submissions.
These ongoing reviews and assessments help to identify key areas of intervention in our operations to drive continued product safety and quality across the entire manufacturing process. Based on these, PepsiCo has identified key food safety focal points, including allergens, microbiological risks, chemical contaminants and foreign materials. We mitigate these risks with robust systems and processes, designed in alignment with stringent internal and external food safety standards.
Risk-based controls are fundamental to PepsiCo’s food safety management systems and are designed to mitigate potential hazards and risks. These controls are critical to our manufacturing and support processes. Our products are traceable, which enables us to quickly investigate and address any potential concerns in the marketplace.
Strategy
Food quality and safety standards
PepsiCo has established strong global quality and food safety standards. We use qualified ingredients and approved suppliers, and follow all applicable regulations issued by regulatory authorities. Our manufacturing locations have traceability systems to trace incoming materials, primary packaging and products, which enable us to quickly investigate and address any potential concerns in the marketplace.
Consumer complaints
PepsiCo maintains a comprehensive management system for tracking, reporting and remediating consumer complaints. We make channels available for consumer contact, including on-pack phone, email or website information, which directs complaints either to PepsiCo or to our third-party franchisees and other business associates as relevant. On the rare occasions when incidents occur, we strive to take quick action, conduct robust investigations, implement corrective actions and share learnings across the system.
Product development
Product development follows our technical stage-gate process to ensure that the design is rigorously vetted, products are made and sold in conformance with stringent internal standards and compliance with all applicable regulations is achieved.
Metrics framework
PepsiCo has established verification systems to monitor performance, including quality control evaluations, audits (internal and third-party) and food safety and quality programs. We evaluate product safety and quality at key points in the product lifecycle, namely design, manufacture, trade and consumption, to improve our processes, performance and culture.
Training and capability development
Capability-building solutions are delivered in support of our strategies and objectives. These tailored training sessions are available to all workers whose roles impact the safety and quality of our products, including the R&D function, plant managers, quality and food safety managers, lab personnel and frontline employees. The training is available to company-owned and third-party manufacturing site employees and is delivered through both virtual and in-person platforms.
Progress
Metrics and targets
The following table includes important food safety and quality metrics that help to measure our progress.
| Metrics | Progress | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | |
| % of company-owned sites that achieved certification from a GFSI-recognized certification program | 100% | >99% | 99% |
| Number of facilities with regulatory violations, defined as U.S. FDA warning letter or equivalent | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Product recalls: number of notable recalls | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Product recalls: total metric tons | 297 | 750 | 108,000 |
| Hectoliters of beverage production | >830 million hectoliters | >820 million hectoliters | >825 million hectoliters |
| Million metrics tons of convenient food production | >8 | >8 | >8 |
| Million metric tons of beverage and convenient food production | >91 | >90 | >90 |
Actions and challenges
In 2025, we strengthened our food safety and quality document management system globally. The new system and tools supplemented our pre-existing systems by providing full transparency of controlled documents globally, advanced search capabilities and real-time tracking of document changes.
We continue to carefully listen to consumer feedback and make measured improvements in the quality of our products. In 2025, we expanded advanced consumer analytics capabilities across our North American and European businesses, enabling greater democratization and transparency of consumer data. These advancements are underpinned by the updated PepsiCo Consumer Quality Standard, which supports ongoing improvements and positions us for future capability.
In 2025, we have continued to invest in new IT systems that connect ingredient and product specifications, optimize speed-to-market and enhance product traceability. We deployed a bespoke system that delivers effective management of regulatory inspections and associated actions. We integrated our corrective actions & preventative actions (CAPA) digital tool across multiple food safety & quality programs and audits creating enhanced insights for evidence-based actions that will prevent future food safety incidents and quality excursions.
In 2025, PepsiCo’s food safety and quality trainings were delivered to employees across all sectors to build the knowledge and skills they require. Training modules were provided to both company-owned and third parties at different levels; across these modules, training is tailored to reflect the specific requirements of our employees and their roles. In addition to targeted company and third-party employees, food safety was a specific feature in our company-wide Code of Conduct training, reaching over 87,500 employees in 2025.
Strategic collaborations
We will continue to leverage strategic external relationships to strengthen our quality and product safety standards and compliance. For example:
- Auditing bodies: PepsiCo is an active participant in GFSI, AIB International and the Corporate Audit Forum. We also collaborate with GFSI-recognized certification program owners, Food Safety Certification Scheme (FSSC), British Retail Consortium Global Standards (BRC-GS), the International Featured Standard (IFS) and Safe Quality Food (SQF) to help us track and trace data more effectively and efficiently.
- Trade associations: PepsiCo is an active member of many associations working on quality and food safety issues, including GS1, Consumer Brands Association, International Society of Beverage Technologists, American Beverage Association and FoodDrinkEurope.
What’s next?
We continue to work with third-party manufacturers and suppliers to expand the use of GFSI-recognized certifications and to invest in intelligent food safety systems that provide objective evidence and improve our decision-making. We are also increasing our focus on food safety and quality culture and engagement from executives to the front line.
We plan to continue to strengthen PepsiCo’s Food Safety and Quality Management System framework, make further investments in information and communications technology, enter into strategic external collaborations and actively engage with regulators and other bodies to enable science and risk-based regulation. Our enterprise-wide systems investments must meet future requirements by our regulators and customers for accuracy and speed.
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