PepsiCo has come a long way since Caleb Bradham, a drugstore owner in New Bern, NC, launched it in 1893. The name was changed to Pepsi-Cola in 1898 when Bradham realized that carbonated sugared cola relieved the discomfort of dyspepsia.
All photographs © PEPSICO INC., Rizzoli New York, 2023
In 2011 a corporate recruiter surprised Mauro Porcini, who was then contentedly employed as the Chief Design Officer of 3M Corporation, with a job for another global giant. Porcini had no interest in leaving 3M for Pepsi. As he writes in an essay in the recently published Good Design is for Everyone: The First 10Years of PepsiCo Design + Innovation (Rizzoli): “I was working on exciting innovation projects, leveraging more than 50 different technology platforms, covering more than 60 industries in almost every existing product category. What more could I do at PepsiCo?”
Good question!
The answers came from atop the corporate ladder where good design was considered a not-so-secret ingredient of business success. Ergo: “good design is for everyone”. Conversations with Brad Jakeman, then President of PepsiCo’s Global Beverage Group, and then with now former CEO Indra Nooyi, convinced Porcini that PepsiCo was a company that promised grand opportunities for genre-pushing creative work. Convinced that Pepsi’s ethos was not merely fizz and fizzle but a global brand with a progressive design-driven agenda, Porcini was lured into his ultimate role as Senior VP and Chief Design Officer. The book marking the tenth anniversary of his reign is an impressive sampling of how to instill brand vivacity into an venerable institution rapidly and agressively changing with the times.
Today the core beverage is known simply as Pepsi. But there is nothing simple about the current brand, which Porcini sees clearly moving forward with the vast array of subsidary brand and products under the company’s larger helm, from Doritos to Gatorade. Not to mention the clothing, expositions and dozens of ancillary materials that expand the PepsiCo universe.
This extravagant book created by JD&Co is a lavish celebration of design, but specifically dedicated to the PepsiCo’s in-house designers who contribute to a massively global narrative of consumption at the highest level. And, how over the past 10 years PepsiCo has transformed into a “people-centric” operation, which chairman and CEO Ramon Laguarta writes in the preface, has been “… a journey that has not only created growth for our company and our shareholders, but has also created untold value for our users, our consumers, our customers, our communities and our planet.”