Approach

We prohibit the use of all forms of forced labor, including involuntary prison labor, indentured labor, bonded labor, military labor, slave labor and any form of human trafficking. No employee may be coerced to work or subjected to physical punishment or threats of violence or other forms of physical, sexual, psychological or verbal abuse as a method of discipline or control. All workers must have freedom of movement, and the conditions of employment must not restrict their movement through the retention of identity papers, holding of deposits, accommodation requirements or any other action aimed at restricting worker mobility. Furthermore, in line with the Employer Pays Principle, no worker should be required to pay recruitment or other similar fees to secure or retain their employment. These standards are embedded in our Global Human Rights Policy and Global Supplier Code of Conduct (SCoC), which outline the expectations for our employees and suppliers.

We conduct ongoing due diligence on our business operations and business-critical, direct suppliers to help assess, identify and address potential human rights impacts within our operations and supply chain. Please see our Human rights page for more information on this process.

Progress

In 2023, we launched a dedicated Combating Modern Slavery training to nearly 2,000 PepsiCo employees across key global functions aimed to help build capacity and provide targeted guidance on how to proactively identify and mitigate modern slavery risk. We also launched intermediate and advanced in-person and virtual trainings on the same topic tailored to key functional groups and sector teams.

We aim to drive responsible recruitment practice in our supply chain by engaging with multi-stakeholder groups and collaborative initiatives. In 2023, we deployed targeted training to our business-critical suppliers on priority topics, such as forced labor and ethical recruitment, and continued to provide open-access online training to help our suppliers better understand our SCoC principles. We deployed responsible recruitment training to our business-critical suppliers located in high-risk countries to clarify our policies, expectations and supplier obligations. Based on the insights and feedback gathered from these sessions, we will continue to focus on building suppliers’ capabilities and management systems to proactively address forced labor and child labor risks. For more on our efforts to support human rights standards in our operations and supply chain see Human rights and Sustainable sourcing.

Through our due diligence process, we continue to assess potential human rights impacts in our supply chain and integrate the learnings and insights into our internal processes. In 2023, we conducted a review of our global human rights due diligence process, which led to the implementation of actions to reinforce our risk-based approach, strengthen our management systems and enhance our assessment methodology.

Insights from country and commodity risk assessments and our due diligence programs have been used to identify our target supply chain segments, raw materials and priority geographies, such as Southeast Asia and Latin America. In recent years, we have continued to expand our due diligence programs to cover these areas of our supply chain; to strengthen our ongoing sustainable sourcing initiatives for palm oil and cane sugar; and to deepen our engagement in regional and local collaborative initiatives to address systemic forced labor challenges at a country-level.

Additional detail on our progress on our journey aspiring to eliminate forced labor in our supply chain can be found in our annual Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement.