Most of the people who actually knew how to lead have been pushed out over the last few years. What we’re left with now is a layer of folks just trying to look busy and avoid making any real calls. You can give feedback, but it goes nowhere. Everyone’s more worried about keeping their own seat than doing what’s best for the work. PepsiCo didn’t fall apart overnight, but you can definitely feel it slowly coming undone.
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@fg and the mot frustrating is that both Athina and HR has very well evidenced which VPs / leaders have failed and are not fit to lead… yet nothing so far has changed apart from G-yatri’s departure… a few year too late!
There are still some good people left there but not enough. The good ones will leave eventually as it will only become harder to manage with fewer and fewer resources. Or they will simple be blamed for performance as Senior Directors save themselves a little longer. It’s a little arrogant that senior leadership will fly in unannounced to tour real life execution but they took away resources from all locations. I guess the PepsiCo way turned into beating up the what little employees they have left that care. I left early last year and I truly bleed blue. I took the deal because it was clear to see how hard 2025 would be as they try to merge beverages with snacks. I was already doing the job of three people and it was not good for my health to ki-l myself for a 2% raise oh I mean 1.5%. Money was not the factor for me as I loved what I did there and was paid fairly except for the last 5 years when cuts year after year led to doing more peoples jobs. Pepsi became greedy during Covid over extended the pricing and never flexed down after and the economy caught up with them and consumers purchased less. They let outsource finance people lead them into a black hole. They blame the low sales on consumers becoming health conscious but that isn’t the case. Average consumer has around $60 to spend they enter the store buy bread for $5 hamburger buns for $3 and hamburger meat for $12 and onion for $1 tomato for $1 then a bag of chips for $6 so 50% is gone on one meal. Where does a $10.99 Pepsi 12pk come into the picture it doesn’t. They spend Billions on POPPI a fad that will be off the shelves in a couple years. All thous Billions spent could have placed more feet on the street to really grow sales and service. You need to grow the brands you have and not pi-s the largest retailers off by cutting service and deliveries to make up for your failed decisions over the years. Coke has multiple employees in the stores and thanks to our finance not flexing down coke is making more money and growing share thru service making it harder on our guy servicing 5 stores alone dealing with late loads due to driver and WH issues. Not to mention the reps supervisor telling him to hurry up so you know they will cut corners and the POPPI we paid billions for will be empty similar to Celsius in the nutrition area. Think about it Walmart is already doing a lot of the orders what’s to stop them from taking it all over? Maybe that’s what we want distribute to a Kroger and Walmart like a Costco and Sam’s Club. Sure stores will get a price break but they are more likely to give us execution and we save some on labor and benefits and injuries.. The market is changing for our customers as well as online shopping continues to grow. Look for them to have distribution hubs vs stores to shop so they can save as well. No sense building a awesome store if they pick items up from the parking lot and never go in.
@f3 Unfortunately, PepsiCo Managers are no longer Managers....They're doers like everyone. All the strategic stuff has been pushed to LG1 and above. Managers here can no longer make a single decision without obtaining approvals from L1, L2, and L3. Everyone has to have their say to justify their roles.
Before we know it, the landscaping crew will have to seek approvals to just cut the grass.
@ey Nowhere has the impact of failed leadership been more evident than at DPA and S&T. Since 2021, there’s been a revolving door of ineffective VP appointments— from solution delivery to the infamous VP of UX. This leadership chaos, infighting, lack of planning and toxic environment has cost PepsiCo significantly over the past three years, delivering little in terms of real value for the business
Managers here don’t know how to lead or manage. Most of them saw easy sales numbers due to iconic brands. If they didn’t get the numbers there was always a miss to blame or no consequences. The worst ones point fingers and say this direct report didn’t perform. They are just people managers and always have the option to blame a team. There is no vision, strategy, and very few of them know how to do anything but put pressure on a team by just saying did you met this goal or that goal. Most are actually dead weight and don’t help grow any sales at all.
Failed leadership, at all levels !!
Been with the company for decades, never seen such poor leadership.
@dx Risks Ongoing sales volume declines in core segments, macroeconomic headwinds, tariff-driven cost pressures, failed digital transformation, spreading nepotism and waste of funding on senior VP and LG roles with limited accountability, clearly failed diversity with too many Indians hired into IT / S&T roles, regular disregard for Pepsico code of conduct, one could go on and on about list of failures and reasons for decline of Pepsico- but it all comes back to one - FAILED LEADERSHIP! from CEO to VPs!
@bg one day someone should publish a book titles ´Pepsico: How Indians and former Accenture consultants ruined once all great American company´
Sometimes I do wonder if a hidden strategy is to lower the company value, its stock price, and then take over by some Indian mogul . So far the leadership is doing exactly that. Recently Bank of America gave up on Its 'Buy' Rating on PepsiCo Stock and downgraded PepsiCo shares from to "neutral" and cut its target price for the beverage and snack giant by 16% ! Bank of America’s research team could no longer find any reasons to support its “buy” rating, citing market share losses in the company’s North American drink business and snack unit.
Pepsi shares slipped over 15% in the past 12 months! and the S&T/DPA money hungry beast just keeps burning company resources without actually delivering real value that would turn things around for Pepsico.
@b7 The people from those sh*thole countries make about a thousand dollars a MONTH. There really is no hope of clawing it back when leadership is looking at quantity over quality.
I think the most eye-opening issues was when there were priority issues in IT it never mattered to them that they would work me anyway, sometimes more than 24 hours, but the offshore folks were allowed to casually say their shift was ending and pass it over to the next person...and we would have to start all over, catching up the next shift on what was happening, what we looked at, what the impact was, etc. The Americans could work until we dropped, but the offshore got their 8-and-skate.
I took the VRP. Best choice I ever made.
I think it’s getting worse now. Senior leaders are bad and arrogant about it. Lots of finger pointing and blame. I hate that they are taking from us now to meet the bottom line.
@a5 are you surprised. Until we have a CEO who stops and stays enough. Stop this vrp and outsourcing to India and other sh-t hole countries. Make people properly accountable to build good solutions to cater towards the customers instead of following that useless Indra 'we must deliver value to shareholders '. In summary cut out stomach to provide unsustainable dividends even if it means burning furniture.
Stop the indianization of this company by freezing Indian hubs who cannot deliver any value. Start the hiring locally and axe the top heavy network Indians networks from IT and other areas. Stop the nepotism, cronnism and remove dead wood. Further recorder if SAP has any future. We are bleeding money.... At/from this useless erp on the business front.
Since my VRP departure I was hired by a former customer and now get to see the burning dumpster from a customer perspective…
It’s much worse than you think, be it beverage or snack: DSD eff-ups , OOS , invoice errors , PES bumbles through its day and equipment takes forever and when it does arrive it looks like cr-p ; and then there’s the obligatory AR helllscape
meanwhile KO m, as bad as it is , looks like freakin’ Apple compared to PEP….
Regardless of what comes out of PEP leadership’s mouth - the new ham-handed culture is to simply don’t give a flying eff about the customer experience