The Doctor Is In

Grappling with a pandemic is tough enough for any business, but for a global food and beverage company such as PepsiCo, which operates in 200 countries on six continents, the spread of a pandemic requires a coordinated response on a massive scale.  

A vast global reach and product portfolio presented both a challenge and an advantage. The company had to monitor the pandemic around the world and anticipate how the virus would affect its ability to produce, distribute and sell its food and beverage products. It also had to keep its employees safe. Fortunately, an innovative, agile culture provided a foundation for early success, and key changes put into motion before the pandemic have helped the company maintain its operations and minimize disruptions. 

It helps to have a doctor at the leadership table. As PepsiCo’s global Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of Life Sciences, Pietro Antonio Tataranni, M.D., is responsible for developing and executing a nutrition and biosciences strategy across the company’s entire portfolio. In his newly expanded role of chief medical officer, he is responsible for continuing to oversee all aspects of the company’s efforts to protect its global workforce, products and communities in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Companies from cruise lines to the CPG industry have added this new executive role to their C-suites in order to better navigate the pandemic with in-house expertise.) 

A Head Start

As the pandemic began to spread in early 2020, Dr. Tataranni says, PepsiCo was already well into a companywide digital transformation. Among its goals was improving the sharing of knowledge throughout the organization. 

As one element of the transformation, the team used AI to conduct Q&A sessions with its R&D subject experts around the world; the results were captured, sorted and codified, creating a rich repository of project work and lessons learned. As Dr. Tataranni says, “This lets us ‘data mine’ our colleagues.” 

Bringing cross-functional teams together gave PepsiCo an agile edge as it responded to the pandemic.

This has proved especially beneficial in a far-flung environment that offers fewer opportunities for organic, in-person sharing of knowledge. “We’ve also created a robust, digitally powered Knowledge Center that helps my 2,500-plus R&D colleagues source knowledge faster and smarter,” Dr. Tataranni says. “This in turn unleashes product innovation and advances our sustainability goals. COVID-19 has disrupted our lives in many ways, but it’s also made the need for accelerated innovation more urgent.” 

As the pandemic spread, the company’s PepsiCo Way culture—which encourages collaboration and taking calculated risks for the benefit of the company—meant local teams were empowered to make decisions based on relevant pandemic factors in their areas. 

“Our local teams are embedded within the markets where they operate, and we rely on their counsel and on-the-ground perspective to guide our decision-making,” Dr. Tataranni says. “For example, some of the early safety protocols that were developed by our APAC team became the foundation for the safety protocols that were eventually deployed by the rest of the organization. “This meant that by the time the Chinese team knew how to handle certain issues, their knowledge could be transferred quickly to the European team, and the American team was watching both teams and anticipating how their knowledge could be applied in the U.S.”