The Pharmacist's Paradox
In September 2025, Elliott Investment Management disclosed a $4 billion stake in PepsiCo and published an open letter calling the company a "dramatic underperformer." The accusation landed with the particular sting reserved for truths everyone already knew. Here was a $200-billion-plus enterprise — operator of one of the most recognized brand portfolios on Earth, employer of over 300,000 people, generator of more than $91 billion in annual revenue — being told, in essence, that it had gotten fat on its own snacks. Elliott zeroed in on the North American beverages division, which despite being PepsiCo's single largest business at $29 billion in annual revenue, had "underperformed its peers for more than a decade on both growth and margins." The drinks that gave the company its name were its weakest asset.
The paradox is not new. It is, in fact, the central tension of PepsiCo's entire 127-year existence: the company named for a cola has never been primarily a cola company — and every attempt to become one, or to transcend one, has produced both its greatest strategic triumphs and its most grinding vulnerabilities. PepsiCo is a snack empire that happens to sell beverages, a CEO factory that periodically forgets how to sell soda, a brand that won the taste test and lost the war. Its story is not a simple narrative of challenger versus incumbent. It is something stranger and more instructive — the story of a company that learned to win by changing the game, over and over, until it wasn't entirely sure which game it was playing.
By the Numbers
The PepsiCo Machine
$91.5BNet revenue, FY2024
$200B+Approximate market capitalization
200+Countries where products are sold
300,000+Employees worldwide
23Brands generating $1B+ in annual retail sales
16Current Fortune 500 CEOs who are PepsiCo alumni
$7.8BPaid to reacquire its own bottlers in 2009
~$2BPoppi acquisition price, 2025
Brad's Drink and the Weight of Second
Caleb Davis Bradham was born in Chinquapin, North Carolina, on May 27, 1867. He wanted to be a doctor. A family crisis pulled him out of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and back to North Carolina, where he opened a drugstore on the corner of Middle and Pollock Streets in New Bern. Behind that counter, sometime around 1893, he mixed sugar, water, caramel, lemon oil, kola nuts, and nutmeg into a concoction his customers called "Brad's Drink." By 1898, he'd renamed it Pepsi-Cola — after pepsin, the digestive enzyme, and the kola nut — and by 1902 he had a trademark, a newspaper advertisement in the New Bern Weekly Journal, and the conviction of a man who sensed what pharmacists in that era often sensed: that the real money wasn't in curing illness but in selling pleasure.
The early trajectory was promisingly steep. From 7,968 gallons of syrup in 1903 to 19,848 in 1904 to 38,605 by 1906. Fifteen bottling plants across the country. Bradham bought a building he called the Bishop Factory for $5,000 and modernized delivery from horse-drawn carts to motor vehicles by 1908 — making Pepsi-Cola one of the first companies in any industry to do so. By 1910, 250 bottlers in 24 states were under contract. The early Pepsi was a genuinely innovative enterprise, one that moved faster than its competitors on distribution infrastructure and branding.
But Coca-Cola had a seven-year head start, a more aggressive bottling network, and — critically — a mythology. Coke was invented in 1886 by a pharmacist in Georgia whose recipe contained trace amounts of cocaine until 1929, a detail that gave the brand a frisson of danger that no amount of pepsin could match. By the time Bradham was selling his first gallon of syrup, Coca-Cola was already becoming an American icon. Pepsi-Cola was good. Coca-Cola was first. The distinction would matter for the next century.
What followed for Pepsi was the kind of corporate history that reads less like a triumph narrative and more like a survival story. The company went bankrupt — not once but multiple times during the early decades, struggling through sugar price volatility and mismanagement while Coca-Cola consolidated its dominance with those famous Santa Claus advertisements beginning in 1931. The Pepsi-Cola Company went through several reorganizations. A lesser brand would have died. That it didn't is less a testament to the product than to the stubbornness of the people who kept buying and resurrecting the name — a pattern that would repeat itself in various forms across the next century.
For anyone interested in the full archaeology of the cola rivalry, Mark Pendergrast's
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola remains indispensable, though it necessarily tells the story from Atlanta's perspective.
The Diplomat Who Sold Sugar Water to the Kremlin
Donald M. Kendall was not a pharmacist. He was a former fountain-syrup salesman with a promoter's instinct and a geopolitician's ambition, and he understood something that Pepsi's previous stewards had not: that the way to beat a bigger rival was not to outspend them in the same arena but to open entirely new ones.
Kendall had risen through Pepsi's ranks on salesmanship and nerve. In 1959, at a trade exhibition in Moscow, he maneuvered Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev into tasting Pepsi-Cola in front of photographers — an image that ran in newspapers worldwide and turned a second-tier American soda into a symbol of
Cold War cultural exchange. It was marketing genius of the highest order, the kind of stunt that cannot be replicated because it only works once, in a specific geopolitical moment, and Kendall happened to be standing in exactly the right spot.
He became Pepsi-Cola's president in 1963 and, in 1965, engineered the move that would define the company's identity for the next six decades: the merger of Pepsi-Cola and Frito-Lay, Inc. to form PepsiCo, Inc.
The logic was deceptively simple. Pepsi could not out-distribute Coca-Cola in beverages — Coke's bottling network and fountain relationships were too deeply entrenched. But by merging with Frito-Lay, Pepsi gained access to a direct-store-delivery system for salty snacks that was, in its own way, as formidable as Coke's beverage infrastructure. More important, the merger diversified PepsiCo's revenue base away from a category where it was permanently second. If you can't win the war, annex a neighboring country.
As they've become less relevant, I don't need to look at them very much anymore.
Kendall built PepsiCo into a diversified food-and-beverage conglomerate, selling soda to the Soviet Union as part of a barter arrangement (Pepsi syrup for Stolichnaya vodka — one of the more improbable trade deals of the Cold War) and expanding the company's restaurant holdings to include Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC. He died in September 2020 at 99, having built an empire that his competitors at Coca-Cola could dismiss and never quite ignore.
Bob Stoddard's
Pepsi: 100 Years captures the Kendall era with particular clarity, and Kendall himself contributed the foreword.
The Generation That Chose
The Pepsi Challenge — launched in 1975 in Dallas, Texas — was one of the most consequential marketing campaigns in American business history, and it worked precisely because it was not merely marketing. It was true. Blind taste tests consistently showed that consumers preferred Pepsi's sweeter, more syrupy flavor to Coca-Cola Classic. Internal studies at Coca-Cola confirmed the finding. "The Pepsi Challenge was not just a marketing gimmick — it was true," observed David Greising, author of I'd Like the World to Buy a Coke.
The campaign did something even more valuable than moving market share. It established Pepsi's brand identity as the challenger, the younger choice, the brand of the generation that refuses to inherit its parents' preferences. "The Pepsi Generation" wasn't a tagline — it was a positioning strategy that would endure, in various permutations, for half a century. Pepsi was the brand that asked you to choose.
Key moments in Pepsi's rivalry with Coca-Cola, 1975–1996
1975Pepsi Challenge blind taste tests launch in Dallas; consumers prefer Pepsi's sweeter formula.
1984Michael Jackson signs with Pepsi; celebrity endorsement era begins. Pepsi also features Tina Turner, David Bowie, Lionel Richie.
1985Coca-Cola launches "New Coke" — reformulated to taste more like Pepsi. Public backlash forces return to original formula within months. Coca-Cola's "mistake" ultimately boosts its sales.
1989Madonna premieres "Like a Prayer" during a $5 million Pepsi commercial — the first time a record debuts in an ad — seen by an estimated 250 million viewers across 40 countries.
1996Coca-Cola's U.S. market share lead reaches 42% to 31% — the widest gap in 20 years.
The 1980s Cola Wars were, by any measure, a golden age of brand competition. Pepsi signed Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, David Bowie. It ran commercials so culturally penetrating that they became events in themselves. In 1989, it paid Madonna $5 million to premiere "Like a Prayer" during a Pepsi commercial — an ad seen in 40 countries by an estimated 250 million people, the first time a song had ever debuted inside a TV spot. Madonna's manager called it the "pop-world equivalent" of a Star Wars film premiere.
And yet. By 1996, Coca-Cola's U.S. market share lead had swelled to 42% versus 31% — the widest gap in two decades. Pepsi had won the taste test and lost the shelf. The New Coke debacle of 1985, which should have been Coca-Cola's Waterloo, instead became a demonstration of brand loyalty so powerful that the "mistake" actually boosted Coke's sales. Consumers didn't want the better-tasting cola. They wanted their cola.
Roger Enrico, who became PepsiCo's CEO in April 1996, wrote about this era with characteristically brash candor in
The Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars — a title that reads differently depending on whether you're looking at taste-test data or market-share charts.
The lesson Pepsi absorbed, slowly and painfully across the 1990s, was that brand mythology operates on different physics than product quality. Coca-Cola's Roberto Goizueta, the cerebral chemical engineer who became CEO and created more shareholder value than almost any executive of his era, kept two charts in his desk drawer. One described Coca-Cola's business model: minimal capital, superb returns, an ocean of cash. The other described PepsiCo's strategy of diversifying into capital-intensive businesses. One day a reporter asked Goizueta about the second chart. "I threw it out," he said. "As they've become less relevant, I don't need to look at them very much anymore."
The Accidental Empire of Salt
The irony of Goizueta's dismissal is that PepsiCo's diversification — the very strategy he mocked — was building something Coca-Cola could never replicate: an integrated food-and-beverage platform with structural advantages that transcended any single category.
Frito-Lay, by the mid-1990s, was not merely a snack company. It was a logistics and distribution machine. Its direct-store-delivery network — trucks visiting individual retail locations to stock shelves, manage inventory, and secure premium shelf placement — gave PepsiCo a physical presence in stores that no pure-play beverage company could match. Lay's, Doritos, Tostitos, Cheetos, Ruffles — each brand occupied different occasions, different price points, different emotional registers, but they all traveled on the same trucks.
The restaurant portfolio — Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC — added another dimension. These were captive distribution points for Pepsi beverages, locations where Coca-Cola could not compete for fountain placement. The logic was vertically integrated in a way that Goizueta's concentrate-and-franchise model simply wasn't.
But the restaurants were capital-intensive, operationally complex, and created conflicts of interest with independent restaurant operators who didn't want to buy beverages from a company that also competed with them for customers. In 1997, PepsiCo spun off the restaurant division as Tricon Global Restaurants (later renamed Yum! Brands). The move was an admission that diversification has limits — that the right strategy isn't to own everything but to own the things that compound together.
What remained after the spin-off was the core that still defines PepsiCo today: beverages and snacks, distributed through overlapping but distinct systems, sold to the same retailers, marketed to the same consumers. This is the structure that PepsiCo's competitors — Coca-Cola on the beverage side, Mondelēz and others on the snack side — have never been able to replicate, because none of them operate at scale in both categories simultaneously.
The Bottler's Dilemma
PepsiCo's relationship with its bottlers has been, across the company's history, both its competitive moat and its strategic straitjacket. The franchise bottling system — in which independent companies purchase concentrate from PepsiCo and handle manufacturing, distribution, and local marketing — allowed the brand to scale nationally without the capital expenditure of building and operating bottling plants. It was the same model Coca-Cola used, and it worked brilliantly in an era when carbonated soft drinks were the only game in town.
The problem emerged as consumer tastes shifted. When PepsiCo wanted to launch new products — teas, waters, juices, energy drinks — the franchise bottlers often lacked the infrastructure, the incentive, or the interest. Bottlers optimized for high-volume carbonated soft drinks couldn't easily pivot to the lower-volume, higher-variety portfolio that the market increasingly demanded. Innovation stalled at the bottler level.
In 1999, PepsiCo had spun off its largest bottling operations as The Pepsi Bottling Group (PBG), creating an independent public company. PBG's IPO gave PepsiCo a cash infusion and a clean balance sheet, and the independent bottler's compound annual earnings growth rate of 16% over the following decade was impressive by any standard. PBG's stock appreciated over 300% from its IPO, outperforming the S&P 500, the Dow, and Coca-Cola Enterprises.
Then, in 2009,
Indra Nooyi reversed the entire strategy. PepsiCo offered $7.8 billion to reacquire PBG and PepsiAmericas, its two largest bottlers, in a deal that gave the company control of 80% of its North American beverage volume. The unsolicited bid initially came in too low — $6 billion, roughly — and the bottlers rejected it. Months of tense negotiations followed, including a lawsuit by PepsiCo against PBG over takeover defenses the bottler had erected. The final terms — $36.50 per share for PBG (a 23% premium) and $28.50 per share for PepsiAmericas (a 22% premium), each half cash and half stock — reflected the bottlers' leverage and the strategic urgency PepsiCo felt.
The fully integrated beverage business will enable us to bring innovative products and packages to market faster, streamline our manufacturing and distribution systems and react more quickly to changes in the marketplace, much like we do with our food business.
The rationale was explicitly about speed and control. Nooyi wanted the beverage side to operate with the same agility as Frito-Lay, where PepsiCo already controlled its own manufacturing and direct-store delivery. The franchise model, which had enabled scale in the 20th century, had become an impediment to innovation in the 21st.
It was a $7.8 billion bet that vertical integration would matter more than capital efficiency. Coca-Cola, watching from Atlanta, was making the opposite bet — maintaining its asset-light franchise model and its concentrate-economics flywheel. Both companies were right about what they needed. The question was which need was more urgent.
Nooyi and the Theology of Health
Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi grew up in Chennai, India, earned an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, and then a master's degree from the Yale School of Management. Before joining PepsiCo in 1994, she had worked at Boston Consulting Group, Motorola, and ABB. She became CFO in 2001, orchestrated the spin-off of Tricon and the acquisition of Tropicana and Quaker Oats, and was named CEO in 2006. She was the first woman and first person of color to lead PepsiCo.
Nooyi arrived at the top with a thesis that was bold, uncomfortable, and — depending on whom you asked — either visionary or commercially suicidal: PepsiCo needed to shift its portfolio from "fun for you" products (Pepsi, Doritos, Mountain Dew) toward "good for you" and "better for you" offerings. She called it "Performance with Purpose." The strategy meant investing in reduced-sugar beverages, healthier snack options, and environmental sustainability initiatives at a time when Pepsi's core cola business was bleeding market share to Coca-Cola.
The pushback was ferocious. Nelson Peltz, the prominent activist investor, fought hard to split PepsiCo in two — separating the snack business from the beverage business — arguing that the conglomerate structure was destroying shareholder value. Investors saw a bloated giant whose top brands were losing share while management focused on vegetables and social responsibility. "Just a few years ago," Harvard Business Review noted in 2015, "it wasn't clear whether Indra Nooyi would survive as PepsiCo's CEO."
If it's a question of media spending to make sure that the consumer understands that Pepsi is still a strong vibrant brand, we are going to spend on media. We're going to fix this. Period.
She survived. She survived because Frito-Lay kept growing — the snack business generated reliable cash and earnings growth that subsidized the beverage transformation — and because the health trend she identified in 2006 turned out to be not a fad but a secular shift. By the time she stepped down in 2018, PepsiCo's revenue had grown to approximately $64 billion from $35 billion when she took over, and the company's stock price had roughly tripled. She had been proven right on the direction if not always on the timing.
Nooyi's other lasting contribution was less visible but arguably more consequential: she hired PepsiCo's first-ever chief design officer, Mauro Porcini, recruited from 3M. Porcini, originally from a small Italian town near Milan, initially turned down the job. It took a meeting with Nooyi in Grenoble, France, to change his mind. "She was trying to reshape an entire industry, an entire way of interacting with the world of food and beverage," Porcini later recounted.
The Design of a Soda Dispenser
Porcini's first assignment at PepsiCo was, fittingly, defensive. Coca-Cola had launched its Freestyle dispenser in 2009 — a sleek touchscreen machine that used microdosing cartridge technology to offer consumers over 100 different drink combinations on demand. It was the kind of technical innovation that dazzles at trade shows and terrifies competitors. PepsiCo's instinct, Porcini said, was to "try to beat them at the same game."
Porcini did something different. With "no official budget," he talked to customers. What he found was that the fancy technology didn't match what restaurant operators actually wanted. Customers were price-sensitive. They didn't want to spend so much on the machines. Many didn't have the space. "We realized that eventually there was an opportunity to use a different technology," Porcini explained, "and use some of the cost savings in adding additional features that were really relevant to the customer."
The result was Spire, launched in 2014 — a touchscreen dispenser that used the traditional, cheaper bag-in-box system instead of Coca-Cola's proprietary cartridges. Its smaller footprint won new customers for PepsiCo. It was not the technologically superior product. It was the one that fit.
This small episode contains the operating logic that has made PepsiCo durable: don't match the competitor's strength; find the dimension they overlooked. Coca-Cola built the more impressive machine. Pepsi built the one that fit behind more counters.
Porcini described the three phases of introducing design thinking into a legacy organization with the precision of someone who had watched it happen in slow motion. Phase one: denial — "The company doesn't understand that they need you." Phase two: hidden rejection — "Everybody's nice to you, they love you, and then as soon as you're out, they're like, 'Okay, thank God he's out. Let's go back to real life.'" Phase three: the occasional leap of faith — "You find some people, what I call the co-conspirators, that decide to bet on you." His observation that "people don't buy products anymore — they buy experiences that are meaningful to them, they buy solutions that are realistic, that transcend the product" was not the standard corporate platitude it sounds like. It was the battle cry of a designer trying to transform a company that had spent a century thinking in terms of gallons of syrup.
The CEO Factory
If PepsiCo's most visible export is Doritos, its most valuable export might be talent. A Fortune analysis found that 16 current Fortune 500 CEOs spent significant time rising through PepsiCo's ranks — a figure exceeded only by McKinsey and General Electric among all companies and organizations. Brian Cornell of Target, Chris Kempczinski of McDonald's, Ed Bastian of Delta Air Lines, Al Kelly Jr. of Visa, Lauren Hobart of Dick's Sporting Goods, Vivek Sankaran of Albertsons, Dave Kimbell of Ulta Beauty, Mary Dillon of Foot Locker, Laxman Narasimhan of Starbucks. Hundreds more C-suite executives with PepsiCo pedigrees populate the Fortune 500.
The system that produced them was refined by industrial organizational psychologist Bob Eichinger, who worked at PepsiCo between 1978 and 1986. Eichinger adapted psychometric tests to evaluate how executives behave, how they affect others, and how they can become more effective leaders. The result was a systematic identification and development apparatus for "high performers" — "hi-pos" in PepsiCo's internal language — who were lavished with stretch assignments around the world, mentorship, intensive training programs, and crucially, the permission to fail.
"We take care of everybody," said Ronald Schellekens, PepsiCo's chief human resources officer. The statement is bland enough to appear on any corporate careers page. But the track record is specific: every PepsiCo CEO in its 57-year history as a merged entity rose from within the company — including current CEO Ramon Laguarta and his predecessor Nooyi. The pipeline isn't a talking point. It's the operating system.
The question this raises — one that no one at PepsiCo particularly enjoys answering — is whether a company that exports this many leaders also exports too much of its own institutional talent. The CEO factory is PepsiCo's contribution to American business. Whether it is also PepsiCo's talent drain is a different conversation.
The Snack Subsidy
PepsiCo's financial story, stripped of narrative, is the story of Frito-Lay carrying the beverage business. For decades, the pattern has held: Frito-Lay North America generates operating margins in the high twenties to low thirties — exceptional for a consumer packaged goods business — while the North American beverage division operates at significantly lower margins. Frito-Lay's direct-store-delivery system, its dominant market share in salty snacks (roughly 60% of the U.S. market by some estimates), and its pricing power create the cash flow that funds PepsiCo's beverage innovation, marketing spend, and acquisitions.
This is not a flaw. It is the architecture. The snack business subsidizes the beverage business's attempts to stay competitive with Coca-Cola. It is, in effect, a permanent internal venture capital fund, generating reliable returns that finance the company's riskier bets on new beverages, health-oriented reformulations, and portfolio expansion.
The key thing is, this is a business that's highly competitive in North America. There's no question about it. It's a big business. It's a profitable business. Is it the same profile of salty snacks? No, but it generates a lot of U.S. cash.
But the subsidy has limits. When Frito-Lay stumbles — as it did in 2024 and 2025, when years of double-digit price increases and shifting consumer preferences weakened demand for snacks — the entire structure wobbles. PepsiCo said in February 2025 that those price increases had damaged demand. By July, the company was scrambling to expand distribution of value brands like Chester's and Santitas to combat perceptions that its products were too expensive.
The Elliott Investment Management letter of September 2025 was, at its core, a critique of this interdependency. The activist argued that PepsiCo's drinks business consisted of "an unwieldy assortment of too many products" that had "strained focus and execution." The implicit message: the snack subsidy had allowed the beverage division to avoid the discipline that comes from standing on its own.
Laguarta's Correction
Ramon Laguarta became PepsiCo's CEO in 2018, a 22-year company veteran born in Barcelona who had run PepsiCo's operations in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. Where Nooyi was the strategist who reoriented the portfolio, Laguarta was the executor who inherited the mandate to make the reorientation work — particularly in a North American beverages business that kept losing ground to Coca-Cola's trademark brands and to an entirely new category of competitors.
The beverage landscape Laguarta confronted bore almost no resemblance to the one that had existed even a decade earlier. U.S. carbonated soft drink consumption had fallen to a 31-year low in 2016 and continued declining. Consumers were moving toward functional drinks — beverages that promised benefits beyond simple refreshment. Energy drinks (Red Bull, Monster, Celsius), prebiotic sodas (Olipop, Poppi), enhanced waters, protein shakes, and gut-health beverages were fragmenting a market that Coke and Pepsi had once dominated as a duopoly.
Laguarta's response, executed through Ram Krishnan, a nearly 20-year PepsiCo veteran appointed to lead the North American beverage division in early 2024, was a multipronged portfolio overhaul:
Gatorade refresh: The original bright-colored sugary sports drink, known for its orange thunderbolt, was being overhauled with new formulations focused on protein, powdered variants, and — arriving in early 2026 — Gatorade Lower Sugar, with 75% less sugar and no artificial flavors or sweeteners. The Gatorade Sports Science Institute in Valhalla, New York, 30 miles north of Manhattan, became the proving ground: treadmills, glucose monitors, sodium-level measurements, a trained-engineer CEO who wanted to know the optimal balance between sodium and potassium given different sweating profiles.
The Poppi acquisition: In May 2025, PepsiCo paid nearly $2 billion for Poppi, the prebiotic soda brand that had captured the imagination of health-conscious millennials and Gen Z consumers. It was PepsiCo's most significant beverage acquisition in years — a bet that the functional soda category was not a niche but a new center of gravity.
The Celsius stake: PepsiCo increased its investment in Celsius Holdings, making the energy brand its lead play in a category that Pepsi had never organically dominated. The deal was an acknowledgment that building an energy drink from scratch was less efficient than buying credibility.
The prebiotic Pepsi Cola: The company launched a prebiotic version of its flagship cola — perhaps the most symbolically loaded product in the portfolio. A prebiotic Pepsi. The very name is a negotiation between heritage and reinvention.
Then came the Elliott settlement. In December 2025, PepsiCo announced it would cut nearly 20% of its product offerings by early 2026, use the savings to invest in marketing and value for consumers, and accelerate the introduction of products with simpler, more functional ingredients — including Doritos Protein and Simply NKD Cheetos and Doritos with no artificial flavors or colors. Organic revenue was projected to grow 2% to 4% in 2026, up from 1.5% in the first nine months of 2025.
We feel encouraged about the actions and initiatives we are implementing with urgency to improve both marketplace and financial performance.
The word "urgency" — appearing in a joint press release with an activist investor — told you everything about the internal tempo.
The Second-Place Advantage
There is a counterintuitive thesis buried in PepsiCo's history, and it goes something like this: being second in cola forced PepsiCo to become first in everything else.
Coca-Cola's dominance in carbonated beverages allowed it to remain, for decades, essentially a one-trick company — albeit the greatest one-trick company in the history of consumer goods. Coke's asset-light concentrate model, which Roberto Goizueta loved so deeply he kept its diagram in his desk drawer, generated extraordinary returns on invested capital. But it also created a strategic narrowness. When soda consumption began its secular decline, Coca-Cola had less to fall back on.
PepsiCo, perpetually trailing in cola, was perpetually forced to diversify. The Frito-Lay merger. The restaurant acquisitions. The Quaker Oats deal (which brought Gatorade into the portfolio). The Tropicana acquisition. Each move was, in some sense, an admission that Pepsi couldn't beat Coke in Coke's game. And each move created an enterprise that was, by almost every measure except brand mystique in the cola category, more resilient.
The result is a paradox: PepsiCo's greatest weakness — its permanent second-place status in cola — is also the source of its most durable strength — a diversified portfolio that no single-category competitor can match.
This is not a comforting insight. PepsiCo would rather be Coca-Cola in cola. Every marketing dollar, every celebrity endorsement, every Super Bowl ad is an attempt to close the gap that has stubbornly persisted since the 1930s. But the gap never fully closes. And the attempt to close it keeps producing interesting strategic decisions that make PepsiCo a better company than it would be if it ever actually won.
The Jingle, the Jet, and the Protest
PepsiCo's brand history is, among other things, a history of advertising stunts — some brilliant, some catastrophic, nearly all instructive.
In 1939, Pepsi created the first radio advertising jingle broadcast coast to coast. In 1940, CEO Walter Mack established one of the first "negro-markets" departments in corporate America, led by Edward Boyd — making Boyd one of the first Black executives in corporate America. Boyd and his team of 12 Black professionals developed a marketing strategy seeking brand loyalty among African Americans that was one of the earliest attempts at niche marketing. They hired some of the first professional Black models, including a young Ronald H. Brown, who would later become U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Stephanie Capparell documented this pioneering effort in
The Real Pepsi Challenge. The Pepsi of 1940 was, in a real sense, ahead of the rest of American business on diversity — not out of altruism but out of competitive necessity. When you can't beat the market leader on distribution, you find the markets the leader is ignoring.
In 1950, Pepsi advertised on television for the first time. By 1977, it had become the most popular cola in supermarkets — a distinction that mattered enormously in an era when grocery was the dominant retail channel for beverages.
The celebrity-endorsement era peaked with the Madonna "Like a Prayer" deal in 1989 and continued to generate both cultural penetration and occasional disaster. In 1996, a Pepsi commercial jokingly offered a Harrier fighter jet for 7 million Pepsi Points. A college student, John Leonard, took the offer literally and attempted to claim the jet, launching a lawsuit that became a Netflix documentary (Pepsi, Where's My Jet?, 2022) and a law school case study in the enforceability of advertisements.
Then, in April 2017, Pepsi released an advertisement starring Kendall Jenner that depicted the model seemingly resolving a protest by handing a police officer a can of Pepsi. The backlash was immediate and overwhelming. Pepsi pulled the ad within 24 hours. The company told Business Insider it was "a global ad that reflects people from different walks of life coming together in a spirit of harmony, and we think that's an important message to convey." No one was convinced. The episode became a case study in the opposite direction — a warning about what happens when a brand conflates selling sugar water with solving social injustice.
The through-line across all these moments is PepsiCo's willingness to take brand risks that Coca-Cola almost never would. Coke's brand is conservative, nostalgic, institutional. Pepsi's brand is restless, youth-oriented, occasionally reckless. The recklessness costs the company, sometimes badly. But it also keeps the brand culturally visible in ways that its market-share position alone would not justify.
In 2024, Addison Rae released a single called "Diet Pepsi" on Columbia Records. It has accumulated over 635 million streams on Spotify. The company didn't pay for it. The brand's name had become, without any corporate intervention, a signifier of a certain kind of youthful desire. That's worth more than any advertising budget, and it's the kind of cultural positioning that comes, paradoxically, from decades of being second — from always needing to stay interesting because you can't afford to be taken for granted.
The Thunderbolt and the Prebiotic
In the Gatorade Sports Science Institute in Valhalla — a facility where athletes run on treadmills while sensors measure the sodium content of their sweat — Ram Krishnan, the trained engineer running PepsiCo's North American beverage division, is building the argument that science can save a brand that was invented by scientists.
Gatorade was developed in 1965 at the University of Florida for the Gators football team. PepsiCo acquired it through the Quaker Oats purchase in 2001 for $13.4 billion. For two decades it dominated the sports drink category so thoroughly that "Gatorade" became a generic term, the Kleenex of electrolytes. Then the market moved. Consumers wanted less sugar. They wanted functional benefits. They wanted the brand to be about something beyond an orange thunderbolt on a sideline cooler.
The Gatorade refresh — Lower Sugar, protein variants, powdered formats — is PepsiCo's attempt to retrofit a legacy brand for a market that no longer values what made it dominant. The nearly $2 billion Poppi acquisition is the hedge — the acknowledgment that some consumers won't come back to Gatorade no matter how the formula changes, and that PepsiCo needs to own the brands they're going to instead.
Meanwhile, PepsiCo announced in December 2025, under the terms of its agreement with Elliott, that it would cut nearly 20% of its product offerings and accelerate products with simpler ingredients. Doritos Protein. Simply NKD Cheetos and Doritos with no artificial flavors or colors. Prebiotic Pepsi Cola. The product roadmap reads like a company trying to thread the needle between "Make America Healthy Again" and $91 billion in revenue built on the things health advocates want Americans to stop eating.
The tension is irresolvable because it is structural. PepsiCo exists to sell pleasure at scale. The market increasingly prices health. The company's strategic challenge for the next decade is not competitive — it can handle Coca-Cola, it can handle Keurig Dr Pepper — but ontological. What is PepsiCo when the things it's best at selling are the things consumers are told not to buy?
In a conference room in Valhalla, the sensors measure the sodium in an athlete's sweat, and the data flows into formulations for a lower-sugar sports drink that will hit shelves in early 2026. It's science. It's marketing. It's a $200 billion company trying to answer a question that Caleb Bradham, mixing sugar and kola nuts in his New Bern drugstore in 1893, never had to ask.
