I'm Jim VandeHei, the CEO and co-founder of Axios. I want to thank PepsiCo for making this conversation, this event, this discussion possible. I'm honored to have the chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, Ramon Laguarta. Come on up.
We know they all came for us, right? I was naive to think that you guys were coming for us, and then I saw Matt Damon and said, well, you know, there's a better crowd here.
So you have framed PepsiCo as faster, stronger, better. Better than what? Better than who?
Now, listen. I think they're all interconnected: faster, stronger, and better. We want to be a best-in-class and very admired company. And for that, we need to be growing faster than everybody else, but we need to do it with a quality of growth. And that's where the better comes into place. So, a better means that, you know, our business model is growth, but we want to make sure that as we grow, we don't deplete the resources that we need for the future. So, it's really a long-term strategy is how we make PepsiCo resilient and faster growing for the long term. We need to protect agriculture. You guys probably know we're a big beverage company, but we're even a bigger food company, right? So, for us, agriculture is critical. We source 50 crops from many parts of the world. And if we don't make agriculture resilient, if we don't protect the health of the soil, if we don't protect the water in the watersheds where we operate, we have a problem long term. So that's why better than the past and hopefully better in the future as well.
And when I think of food, I don't typically think of an industry that's getting disrupted, but you were making the point that it is, that even in the last six months, you've had a big shift in terms of people caring a lot more about what's in their food and then you have to instantly adapt to that.
Yeah, I think there's probably not a better time to be in the food industry because we're having tremendous fun transforming our companies. We're transforming our companies from the portfolio point of view, as you were saying, trying to follow the consumer fast and ahead of the consumer if we can. And that's innovation. We're innovating in a lot of areas that, you know, it's functionality, permissibility, it is indulgent, it is better experiences, but it's also following the consumer away from home. The consumer is eating more and more away from home and our retail business is great, but we're growing away from home three or four times faster. So that's critical. It is very exciting also in our industry how we're adopting technology and that's another massive disruption that we as a company are saying, wow, technology applied to agriculture. So AI in agriculture and how we make the farmers more intelligent, more knowledgeable of the resources they use and more productive. Also, technology to make better jobs in our company. Right? So if you think about our company, we have 300,000 people. If we enable these associates of ours to make better decisions, imagine only four better decisions per day. That's a million better decisions per day. Okay. So imagine our company, how faster we can grow, how better we can be, how much we can empower people, feel more satisfied with the information and decisions they make. So technology adoption and making sure that we adopt technology fast, we deploy them with good use cases that are ROI positive, but also empower our people are critical. And that's what we spend, and I see some of my colleagues here in the management team, that's where we spend our time.
How do you do that? Like I think we have 500 people-ish at Axios. It's hard enough to move 500. You have 300,000. That's like moving a city.
It is moving a city. A delegated city. I mean, like all over the world. I think when it comes to technology and data, I must say five years ago, we didn't think of technology and data as strategically as we do today. We didn't think that we would be competing on data and technology the way we are. So we started investing five years ago in data foundation, in making sure we're moving to the cloud, that we have the right system, the right infrastructure, we train our people, and now we're ready to deploy technology. We do it in a very centralized way. We cannot waste resources by everybody trying to innovate in different parts of the company. So we test in many different parts of the company, but we're doing it with a central brain. Once those business cases are tangible and we know that as we scale we make more money, we scale globally. So that's the way we're managing technology. We're building a network of partnerships that are critical. We cannot do this alone. So people like hyperscalers or people are helping us create, like we announced a couple of weeks ago, a partnership with Nvidia and Siemens around building digital twins across all our plants around the world. We have over a thousand plants. How do we build digital twins that help us use less resources, be more productive, ensure that we maintain our lines ahead of time. And so those are big investments that we're making. So we are a farming company, a brand company, innovation company, a technology company all in one. And at the center of all these is our people. As you said, 300,000 people that we cannot manage, we cannot hold their hand. But if they're engaged, if they're committed, if they know where we're going, they make this company incredible. And that's what we do.
In thinking about this event and sustainability, I came over today with Alex Taylor from our company, from our parent company at Cox, and we're talking about how Davos used to be all about sustainability and it seems to have shrunk as a topic that people talk about. You think about it a lot. How do you think about the topic? Why do you as a company care about it and how do you put that into motion?
