PepsiCo, Inc.

PepsiCo, Inc. is a global beverage and convenient food company that makes, markets, distributes, and sells a portfolio of brands — including Lay's, Doritos, Cheetos, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew, Quaker, and SodaStream — in more than 200 countries and territories, generating $93.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Headquartered in Purchase, New York, it employed approximately 306,000 people as of year-end 2025 and is organised into six reportable segments spanning North American foods and beverages, international franchise beverages, Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific.

This is a story about a consumer staples compounder navigating an unusually difficult stretch in its home market while its international business quietly becomes the engine. PepsiCo enters the second half of 2026 having just lapped nearly $2 billion of impairment charges that depressed fiscal 2025 earnings, while at the same time investing aggressively in affordability to reignite volume growth in its flagship North American salty snacks category. The numbers are noisy: reported operating profit swung from a GAAP decline of 11% in FY2025 to a 65% gain in the first half of FY2026, almost entirely because the Rockstar brand impairment that crushed the comparison period did not repeat.

The file turns on a single question: whether the North American business can stabilise without consuming so much management attention and investment that the company starves the faster-growing, increasingly profitable international operations that now account for roughly 42% of revenue and an outsized share of growth. This is fundamentally a resource-allocation tension — the kind of problem that separates durable compounders from ones that drift.