PepsiCo – Will Slotznick – 2022

Goals

PepsiCo has pledged to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040 and net positive water operations by 2030, which will place the company as a leader in sustainability practice across the Food and Beverage industry. 

This will require investments in new production facilities and fleet expansions and directly affect Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. 

PepsiCo’s Global Sustainability Office (GSO) enlisted EDF Climate Corps Fellow Will Slotznick to develop a toolkit to measure and demonstrate the end-to-end climate impacts of proposed projects . By equipping leads with better data and metrics, GSO hopes to motivate climate-positive design alternatives that keep PepsiCo on-track with its sustainability objectives.

Solutions

Will approached the development of the carbon and water toolkit for Capex in four stages:

• Landscaping: Interviewed GSO managers to understand the company’s experience with carbon measurement. This work provided foundational context, resources, and templates for subsequent steps.   
• Prototyping:  Prototyped a new automated environmental footprint calculator to help measure proposed investment projects.
• User Testing and Revision: Piloted the toolkit with pipeline proposals from three regions (Europe, North America, and South Asia), and revised the instruments based on feedback from key finance, engineering, and procurement voices. 
• Roll-out Strategy: In collaboration with Sustainable Finance teammates, determined the strategy, timeline, and workstream owners to build adoption of the new tool in routine review decisions.

Potential Impact

Over the next 10 months, GSO will partner with PepsiCo’s Corporate Finance team to implement the Carbon and Water Calculator (and other analytical innovations) in the project review process at the corporate level and later at the regional level. The progressive roll-out will be supported by ongoing learning sessions on how project designers can best leverage the new framework to meet their sustainability goals. GSO aims for these changes to affect avoided carbon emissions and water reduction across PepsiCo to propel the business towards its 2030 and 2040 ambitions.