Approach

PepsiCo shares concerns regarding the ethical and humane treatment of animals and supports the Five Freedoms of animal welfare to support good physical and mental well-being for all animals within our direct supply chain:

1. Freedom from hunger and thirst
2. Freedom from discomfort
3. Freedom from pain, injury, or disease
4. Freedom to express normal behavior
5. Freedom from fear and distress

As a major convenient foods and drinks company, we strive for sustainable practices in animal well-being. Some products in PepsiCo's broad global portfolio use animal ingredients — for example, cheese seasonings, eggs in baked items and other products or chicken broth. Apart from our dairy business, animal products represent a small portion of our commodity purchase volumes.

In 2020, PepsiCo consolidated its work on animal welfare into its first ever Global Policy on Animal Welfare. In it, we share our focus on and approach to managing relevant issues in our supply chain, including dairy cattle and broiler chicken welfare, cage-free eggs and animal testing.

Working closely with our suppliers is vitally important to improving animal welfare in our global supply chains. Many of the animal ingredients we purchase do not come directly from farmers, which makes suppliers key partners to driving improvements. PepsiCo's suppliers are expected to adhere to the standards set in our Global Supplier Code of Conduct and are urged to support the principles laid out in our Global Policy on Animal Welfare.

We plan to work with our partners toward our vision of continuing to source 100% cage-free eggs in the U.S. (achieved in 2020) and to source cage-free eggs in global markets by the end of 2025. We aim to achieve this by reformulating certain products to incorporate egg-substitute ingredients and transitioning to cage-free egg suppliers.

Progress

We continue to work with suppliers to support compliance with the standards set out in our Global Policy on Animal Welfare.

Pursuing our pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) ambitions means that we focus our efforts on the areas where our ability to drive systemic change is the greatest. This includes, among other areas, spreading the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices across 7 million acres of the land used around the world to grow our crops and ingredients for our products.¹ For more information, see Agriculture. Our sustainability materiality assessments help us to prioritize these efforts.

Cage-free eggs

Our 2023 cage-free egg procurement was approximately 55% of our total global egg spend.² Since 2020, all egg ingredients purchased in the United States have been derived from 100% cage-free chickens, and in 2023 in Europe, approximately 95% of purchased egg ingredients (by spend) was sourced from cage-free chickens.

Based on available statistics, we estimate that our egg procurement represents less than one-tenth of a percent of the global egg market.³

Our market teams have plans in place to support our efforts to transition to 100% cage-free by the end of 2025 or sooner. For example, the procurement team in Canada, our second-largest egg buying market after the United States, has been working with their egg supplier and expects to make the transition to cage-free by the end of 2024. In other markets, different tactics are supporting the transition. For example, we are reformulating recipes to reduce the amount of egg ingredients we procure and re-evaluating our supply chain, identifying new egg suppliers as necessary. We plan to continue reporting annually on our progress here as we work towards our 2025 vision.