Thread regarding PepsiCo Inc. (Pepsi) layoffs

@b2 boards of directors of Fortune 500 companies are worthless. Basically a 300k boondoggle to attend a couple of meetings, play a little golf and eat a nice meal. Especially worthless when the chairman is also the CEO. The conflict of interest with the wife being a contractor is really stunning

Major strategic errors can't be remedied by small-scale tactical measures. It is a concept that Pepsico leadership can't seem to grasp.

Funny how a Bloomberg reporter asks a few questions and half this thread decides she's an HR plant. Think about what that says.

Nobody jumps to "it's HR fishing for names" unless they've seen HR act that way. Concerns get passed back to managers, complaints go nowhere, and the people who speak up end up being the ones in trouble. That's how you end up with employees who are more afraid of HR than they are of the layoffs.

She's probably just a reporter doing her job. The paranoia is the real story. HR leadership has become the company's biggest liability, and everyone below them knows it.

@ag this!!!

“ Internally, it’s chaos. Systems don’t communicate, processes are unnecessarily complicated, and employees spend an absurd amount of time navigating dysfunction just to accomplish routine tasks. Rather than fixing these barriers, leadership introduces more busy work”

FIX THE INTERBAL PROCESSES. And stop asking for more decks.

@da This is not targeted at people with an ethnic last name. Nor does it delegitimize your hard work, knowledge and skills.
It illustrates some of the targeted hiring and promoting practices.

For the person who said diversity is racist, it is reverse racism. Diversity is great, but if you push people to promote based on this and have a quota, that is illegal. You have to do it in the correct way according to US law and PEP does not.

I’ve communicated with her. She is really nice person who is genuinely curious to understand PepsiCo issues and why things have went south. It is all private and anonymous on signal.
I encourage anyone who have specific info to reach out to her.

@d6 we should mention nepotism sinks diversity and hurts promoting the best. Get rid of nepotism.

@d6 age and nepotism came first, then race/ethnicity, then female. Change your last name to Garcia or Gonzalez and you will get promoted over the ones who have business experience and a higher education. Be a young female. Real performance does not matter. I watched this happen again and again.
The leaders PDR depended on them meeting a DEI number. Did you not notice the rapid promotion of young females???

@br just contact Bloomberg directly and ask for her if you think the poster is HR. I think this is legitimate and everyone that cares about the people stuck at Pepsi supporting their families, should expose what’s going on.

@ag your comments were dead-on until you chased the “diversity” rabbit …. Part of our problem is antiquated racist mindsets that have infected fringes of our corporate culture … lazy minds like to point fingers at that stuff

Project Mustang. Please. That’s the definition of PepsiCo over the last 5 years. Generously.

@br - look up state shield laws if you’re concerned about HR and stiff… because while I appreciate your suspicions (our company is psycho), I don’t think a rando would share a hard to find Bloomberg reporter’s email and Signal account, ha ha. She’s a serious reporter and used to be at the Wall St Journal. I’ve read her stuff before for some of my personal investments outside of Pep.

Please people with knowledge, be bold and help. Turn your concerns into progress and change (or whatever motivates you). The real world has zero idea what we are facing and how real people are being affected. This is HUGE for someone to actually care about us!

How do you know this person is not a HR rep, I would love to share but want to make sure folks are not falling into trap.

@Kristina, anything you can add to ensure authenticity and confidentiality will gather more traction to information you’re seeking.

For years we had leaders that would not consider qualified applicants if they were not the right gender or race. This was all to meet quotas tied to performance bonuses. It’s one of many reasons PepsiCo has been failing.

The real perspectives of exactly what’s going on won’t be shared. If you want to know why all the senior executives quietly leave, no matter how unusual it seems, this is the reason. The story we want to read won’t be written because of the agreements that have clearly been signed.

Look into how PepsiCo C-Suite “leaders” can keep their millions in salaries, bonuses and stock options - while people are let go, roles aren’t backfilled, and employees must continue to absorb all the work year after year - barely getting raises. Also as mentioned - how the CEOs wife is a contractor. How does the CEO have time to sit in multiple boards, while employees work endless hours?

@b2 Yes look into who owns supplyforce.com. They are middleperson to order through instead of directly from the local distributors. Supply force is run by Vice presidents wives. Lots of shady stuff going on .

Interesting comment from Coke's CEOin a recent news article: The Coca-Cola Company is NOT even AI-enabled. "We simply know how to operate."

PEP has invested so much on AI but it seems it made things worse for us.

maybe also look into why the ceo’s wife is allowed to be a contractor and why the board declined to investigate when concerns were raised about her.

@ag Could not have said it better myself.

Hello Kristina. It’s hard to read your stuff online because I don’t have a login, I’m sorry… but it looks like you’re a very respectable reporter.

I agree with what a lot of people are saying. I won’t even pretend to be some sort of business expert or MBA degree but to be very clear… nothing at all at PepsiCo is working. We’re coming apart at the seams.

So much of Elliot’s complaints made sense and were completely accurate. I had hope that we could hold on to what makes the two units special and hold on to the identities of both Frito Lay and Pepsi beverage… but the next thing I knew, they had torn down the Frito Lay Headquarters sign in front of our Texas building and replaced it with PepsiCo.

I was recently reprimanded for talking to a retail customer about Frito Lay. I can’t even wear my Frito Lay uniform shirts anymore at the office or in the field because they’ll report me to HR.

I think PepsiCo is letting the narrative of “okay yeah maybe we will consider the separate business units” thing exist on the external side but inside the business that is not true. They have taken away all identity and I still don’t have a single reason (that makes sense to me) why.

Meanwhile I’m being kicked in the shins with increasingly impossible sales goals and trying to sell these backward mistakes to my customers (Walmart) who just don’t believe us anymore.

Sh-t rolls downhill as you know…. You can’t tell me all of these decisions aren’t also affecting how our consumers think of us too.

It su-ks and it makes me so sad. I miss the company I used to be proud to work for and I miss the many people who have been laid off simply because they were dismissed as another blue collar replaceable (they think) worker.

Thanks for caring enough to research our stories.

Yes. Look into Athina.

Athina Kanioura is Chief Executive Officer, Latin America Foods and Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at PepsiCo.

Two different roles - one strategic and on operational. Seems to be a major conflict.

@OP be sure to ask about the pauses on employee anniversary celebrations. All deferred into 2027.

@ag brilliant post

The reorgs are crazy. In the past 3 years, I’ve had multiple bosses, numerous turn overs in sales support staff. No one knows what the he-l any processes are or who does what. All reorgs are half baked and none of them are functional.

The CEO of a floundering PepsiCo should not also be sitting on the Boards of Visa and IBM. Choose one hat to wear and commit to it, not just to your own financials. Prioritizing the company your head of should take precedence above all others. Even us peasant hourly frontline folks can figure that much out.

Ask to go deep on Athina. She’s the real CEO pulling all the strings.

Almost 30 years of Pepsi experience here. PEP has become a company in serious operational disarray, and the problems go far beyond layoffs or slowing sales.

Annual operating plans have become little more than elaborate commercials for products, filled with corporate buzzwords and made up growth targets but lacking realistic execution plans, resources, or accountability. Leadership spends enormous amounts of time presenting product commercials without addressing the fundamental problems preventing employees from executing them.

The company has become obsessed with cutting costs, eliminating positions, and outsourcing critical functions to the lowest bidder. Many of these outsourced providers are unresponsive, ineffective, and held to little accountability. Employees are left chasing third parties to resolve basic issues while still being held responsible for the results. PepsiCo may be saving money on paper, but the operational damage and lost productivity are enormous.

Internally, it’s chaos. Systems don’t communicate, processes are unnecessarily complicated, and employees spend an absurd amount of time navigating dysfunction just to accomplish routine tasks. Rather than fixing these barriers, leadership introduces more busy work. Asking for data and numbers they could look up themselves. Asking for hours of presentations for presentations so they can look at it for 5 minutes if at all. I also highly doubt the reliability of our internal sales reporting numbers, but that’s another deep subject.

Yearly staffing reductions mean employees inherit more responsibilities with fewer resources. Merit increases are disappointing, bonus targets are made unattainable, and morale has deteriorated significantly. Employees are expected to continuously deliver more while receiving less in return.

Perhaps most concerning is the quality of leadership. Too many managers appear to lack the experience, professionalism, or authority to solve any org problems. Pepsi promotes diversity candidates and young, cheap “leaders”.

PepsiCo doesn’t have a shortage of talented people or strong brands. It has a serious execution and leadership problem. Cutting more employees while refusing to address broken systems, ineffective outsourcing, and layers of unnecessary management will only accelerate the decline.

Senior executives need to stop congratulating themselves on cost savings and start taking responsibility for the dysfunctional organization they’ve created.

You cannot build a high-performance company by systematically dismantling the tools, resources, and morale of the people expected to deliver the results.

@Kristina

If you mail out how corporate heavy this organization is, you would quickly notice the problem. The slogan is “Faster, Stronger, Better”, but the whole Ramon’s term is “worse, Slow and weakened” the organization from inside.

If you map the number of C-Suite, SVP, VP, Sr. director, Directors at PepsiCo, you will quickly see a pattern.

Cutting 1000s of L06 and below doesn’t even given a fraction of savings, in the otherhand the top heavy organization is political, parasitic, and have hurt the company by destroying competence, culture from the core.

PepsiCo is headed down hill the way of Kraft Heinz. Accountability should start at top,

Is this a trap and the Pepsi police will come around and fire you? Was told to expect quarterly reorgs for a while so don’t want to get on the list!

If she goes though this site, she can see that there is zero confidence employees have on the Exec Leadership

God I would freaking love for her to report on the continued massive cuts of front line (think ops and sales and supply chain who literally make our products and work 14 hr days selling them in stores) and even R&D, but somehow all the supporting roles who are supposed to further that foundation (think brand advertising and marketing and all the HQ account managers) somehow continue to be untouchable. This company won’t ever change until those people are held to the same standards. Ramon keeps saying “we’re not satisfied with performance” but maybe he needs to look at the people who aren’t hitting their marks at all but then making 10 times the salary I am??

I’d highly recommend anyone familiar with Project Mustang to reach out to Kristina….. and Kristina, if you haven’t read this LinkedIn article, you should. This is the most robust and stripped down version of the inner clusterf*ck of PepsiCo I’ve ever read and wish mainstream media would report on it. I can personally vouch for much of what his anonymous sources say. Thx for coming to the source and not our bloated and completely insulated corporate PR dept…. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/project-mustang-poppi-planetary-boundaries-pepsico-company-ladd-wgldc