Approach

Too many people in communities across the world are feeling the effects of food insecurity. While PepsiCo is one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies, its products generally represent a small component of individuals’ diets. In recent years, we have expanded areas of our business into new food categories that can be central to a healthy diet. We also continue to improve the nutritional profile of our existing product portfolio, to help make the Positive Choice an easy choice. In addition, we strive to impact food security beyond the products that we sell by sharing agronomic expertise with farmers and driving the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices, a transition that can increase crop yields and thereby bolster farmers’ livelihoods, and through shared value collaborations that aim to provide nutritious meals to underserved children and families around the world.

We recognize that we cannot address food insecurity alone — it is a complex challenge that requires cross-sector solutions. Leveraging relationships across our value chain, our work to improve food security aims to contribute towards increased availability of and access to nutritious foods, while helping to support the stability of the food systems and environments that produce them. We strive to complement our commercial efforts with long-term philanthropic investments in a way that extends positive impact beyond our company walls. We are broadening our ability to drive impact by, for example, leveraging our logistics expertise to facilitate distribution of nutritious meals.

We have established several objectives aligned with the objectives of SDG 2. Specifically, by 2030, we aim to support global progress by:

• Building food security: Partner with communities to advance food security and help make nutritious food accessible to 50 million people;² and
• Investing towards SDG 2: Zero Hunger: Invest $100 million in agriculture and other food and nutrition access programs in select priority markets identified by external experts, as part of the Zero Hunger Private Sector Pledge;

Other areas of our pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) strategy strive to contribute to our ambitions on food and nutrition security, including our efforts to:

• Improve nutrition: Reduce added sugars, sodium and saturated fat across our portfolio and deliver more portions of diverse ingredients — such as legumes, whole grains, fruits and vegetables, plant-based proteins and nuts and seeds — that people do not consume enough of in many countries;
• Promote sustainable agriculture: Spread the adoption of regenerative agriculture, restorative or protective practices across 10 million acres of land supporting the growth of our key crops and ingredients by 2030³ and aim to improve the livelihoods of more than 250,000 people in our agricultural supply chain and supporting communities by 2030 through dedicated programming aiming to support economic prosperity, farmer and farm worker security and inclusion and economic empowerment.⁴ 

See our Agriculture and Nutrition pages for more detail on these ambitions.

Building food security

In some areas of the world, affordability and access may stand in the way of adequate nutrition. In markets around the world, we are diversifying our portfolio in an effort to provide access to nutritious foods with important benefits. We aim to create products with brands consumers trust that suit local needs in terms of both taste and nutrition, while offering different choices of pack sizes and value.

In order for our food products to contribute towards our goal to increase access to nutritious food for 50 million people by 2030,² they must:

• Meet our internal Global Nutrition Criteria for Affordable Nutrition Initiatives, which includes maximum thresholds for nutrients to limit (e.g., added sugars, sodium, saturated fats and trans-fat); minimum micronutrient levels to help combat hidden hunger; and food groups and nutrients to encourage such as whole grains and fiber; and
• Be accessible to lower-income consumers at risk of poor nutrition. We determine this at the market level informed by local socioeconomic indicators and externally available data.

Investing towards SDG 2: Zero Hunger

PepsiCo was a founding member of the Zero Hunger Private Sector Pledge in 2021 and has made one of the most ambitious commitments to date, totaling approximately 1/6 of the total amount pledged by 70 companies as of March 2025. Our pledge is made in together with over 20 organizations across more than 20 priority markets. This program targets two high impact areas:⁵

• Agricultural interventions to help support sustainable practices that are economically viable for farmers; and
• Scaling up social protection programs aimed at reducing vulnerability to economic shocks, such as school feeding programs.
  

Improving nutrition

In addition to investing in affordable, nutritious products and expanding into staple foods in some markets, we are working to improve the nutritional content of products across our portfolio to make even our more indulgent products more nutritious. We are pursuing our Positive Choices goals by selling more of our existing products that meet these nutritional targets, launching new, more nutritious products and renovating existing recipes to improve the nutritional profile, helping to make the healthier choice the easier choice for consumers. For more detail, see Nutrition.

Promoting sustainable agriculture

We currently source agricultural crops and ingredients from more than 7 million acres around the world. We believe that regenerative agricultural is essential in supporting local food supplies and meeting the increasing demand for food as the global population continues to grow. We seek to drive systemic change by providing farming communities within our supply chain with agronomic advice aiming to build capabilities and to drive adoption of regenerative farming techniques, which can increase crop yields and quality and improve resilience against evolving climate impacts. 

In many cases, the regenerative agriculture practices that benefit PepsiCo crops — such as improved soil health, better pest management practices or more efficient irrigation — also benefit other crops in farmers’ rotations. This often includes staples like rice, maize, lentils and pulses that are planted in rotation with crops grown for PepsiCo. We also work to help to ensure stable, predictable income for farmers, protecting them from post-planting market volatility. By supporting improved profitability through stable income from cash crops, we aspire to enable farmers’ continued participation in a sustainable agrifood system.

We also recognize that poverty and food insecurity are inextricably linked, and that by working to improve farm productivity, we may positively impact the livelihoods of farmers and their families by enabling access to greater nutrition.

Progress

Building food security

In 2024, the PepsiCo Foundation reached 220,000 individuals with access to nutritious meals, delivering over 8 million meals globally. In total, PepsiCo and the PepsiCo Foundation have impacted more than 62 million people since 2021.  For more detail on the PepsiCo Foundation's philanthropic efforts to address hunger and nutrition insecurity with scalable, community-based solutions, see the 2024 PepsiCo Foundation Impact Report. Additionally, PepsiCo's commercial activities which aim to advance food security and access to nutritious foods include:

• In Mexico, we sell Quaker® 3 Minutos, a whole grain, oat-based breakfast food fortified with nine vitamins and minerals. It contains Iron and vitamin B12, which are two major nutritional deficiencies in the country.
• In South Africa, White Star® super maize meal provides the taste and convenience consumers want, while also containing critical micronutrients, including Vitamin A, Folic Acid, Iron, four B-vitamins and Zinc. Our local portfolio also includes other staple foods such as legumes and pulses, offering key nutritional benefits to consumers at an affordable price point.
• In 2024, we launched Quaker® Oat “Rice” in Brazil, a new way to reach local consumers with a staple food with improved nutrition. Quaker® Oat “Rice” contains twice as much fiber and twice as much protein as brown rice — and can easily be incorporated into signature Brazilian dishes. Profits support community food security initiatives, through a collaboration with local organization Amigos do Bem.
• Additionally, in the U.S., we work to ensure nutritious products are accessible to low-income women, infants and children up to age five who are at nutritional risk through the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). We are consistently innovating to make products that meet the applicable federal- and state-level requirements through a combination of new product development, pack size changes and additional investments. A full list of PepsiCo’s WIC-approved products is available here.

Investing towards SDG 2: Zero Hunger

The coordinators of the Zero Hunger Private Sector Pledge commission an independent evaluation of company progress on a bi-annual basis. The first accountability report for this pledge was published in 2023, and the next report is expected to be published by the end of 2025. By the end of 2022, PepsiCo had invested nearly $20 million of its 2030 $100 million target towards its Pledge.

Improving nutrition

See Nutrition for more on our related efforts to offer consumers more Positive Choices.

Promoting sustainable agriculture

In collaboration with the German government-owned Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), PepsiCo is working with local potato crop farmers in Thailand to help drive adoption of climate change adaptation and mitigation practices, such as the use of drip irrigation and integrated pest management. This initiative aims to increase yields and reduce the carbon footprint associated with potato production relative to traditional farming methods. Outside of potato season, similar guidance can be adapted for maize and rice crops, just one example of how our investments in regenerative agriculture aim to benefit the broader food supply.

Strategic collaboration

Achieving food and nutrition security requires society to address a complex set of sociocultural, political, geographic and economic factors. These variables require a collective approach that brings together stakeholders to improve collective knowledge on how to sustainably produce and distribute the food we eat, while making it safe, available and adaptable to address consumers’ needs. By working in collaboration with industry peers, local and international governments and NGOs as well as employees globally, PepsiCo and others in the private sector aim to leverage their unique expertise and capabilities to help accelerate progress towards zero hunger. For more information, see Food and nutrition security collaboration and engagement.

What's next?

A lot of work remains to meet SDG 2 — to create a hunger-free world — by 2030. For our part, we remain resolute in our ambitions for global food and nutrition security and are already executing programs aiming to address this issue. We are also working closely with the Zero Hunger Pledge coordinators to report on progress towards our 2030 goal, raise awareness of the Zero Hunger Pledge among our peers and encourage others in the private sector to join.

¹FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, & WHO. (2024). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024 – Financing to end hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms

²Results represent the cumulative sum of people reached with nutritious food per annual reporting period through programs funded through charitable contributions, as well as through commercial efforts that are intended to provide nutritious food. For more information, see Calculation Methodology

³See PepsiCo’s Regenerative Agriculture Guidelines for additional information, including details on key crops and regeneration, restoration and protection criteria. Results reflect total acreage meeting these criteria within the annual reporting period

⁴This goal captures the number of livelihoods reached through an outcome-focused evaluation measuring improvements in economic prosperity and farmer and farm worker security. Metric counts the cumulative people impacted since 2021

⁵High-impact areas were identified by the coordinators of the Zero Hunger Pledge based on the research from Ceres2030, a project led by Cornell University, the International Food Policy Research Institute and the International Institute for Sustainable Development