PepsiCo outlines its sustainable water strategy

Seb Hancox
Nov 10, 2025
7 min read

The food and beverage giant is ramping up reuse and tapping alternative water sources to meet its targets. GWI finds out what its plans are for the future.

David Grant

Senior director of global climate and water solutions, PepsiCo.

GWI spoke to David Grant about how PepsiCo is embedding water stewardship across its operations and how it plans to meet its 2030 targets. Source: PepsiCo

PepsiCo is one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies, operating in more than 200 countries and territories. With a portfolio of over 500 brands, it owns household names such as Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Quaker and Lay’s (Walkers). The company’s operations span soft drinks, bottled water, crisps, cereals, and ready meals, with convenience foods accounting for more than half of its global revenue.

Water is used widely across the food and beverage industry for cleaning, cooking, mixing and as a raw ingredient of products themselves. Under its "pep+" strategy, PepsiCo met its 2025 water efficiency target two years early, and now aims to become net water positive by 2030.

What are the key pillars of PepsiCo's water strategy and what targets have you set?

Water scarcity continues to be a pervasive issue around the world. As a food and beverage company, we certainly realise the critical role that water plays in our food system. Ultimately, our ambition is to ensure that wherever we operate in the world, water resources will be in a better state because of our presence.

We've got an overall vision of being net water positive by 2030. We have a 100% replenishment target for both our own operations and our bottlers, and we also have a very strong commitment to water access, with a target of reaching 100 million people by 2030. When we talk about water efficiency and replenishment, that spans both our operations and our agricultural supply chain. For efficiency, we've got a beverage water use target of 1.4l/litre and a food target of 1.7l/kg. We hit our agriculture target of 15% improvement in agricultural water-use efficiency two years early, and saw a very strong focus on water use optimisation through our regenerative agriculture programme.

In 2024, we kicked off our watershed health programme. A distinguishing factor here is that we’re working with non-PepsiCo growers. Our farmers can be the most water efficient in the world, but if surrounding farmers are not implementing efficient water management practices, these savings could be impacted – it’s a zero-sum game. The programme is designed to bring about a systematic change in water use and stewardship.

What are PepsiCo’s main sources of process water and how do you treat it?

Our principal supply is municipal, but we do also rely on groundwater in some locations, and a very small minority comes from surface water. All incoming water is treated to potable water standards and actually exceeds it. It’s really a multi-step process that includes filtration, reverse osmosis (RO), carbon filters, sand filters, and UV disinfection.

What is PepsiCo doing to improve water efficiency in its factories?

Essentially, we've adopted a circular approach to water within our factories, and it’s a combination of two areas. One is our resource conservation (recon) programme, which trains and empowers employees to understand the basics of water and how to conserve it with existing equipment. Once we are at best practice, the second layer asks what new technology we can put into place to further reduce our water consumption.

In beverages, we have a system called burst rinsing. When we change flavours, we have to rinse the vessels out to remove the previous flavour, so it doesn't interfere with the new flavour coming in. Typically, this would be a 30-minute process wherein you would have to continuously spray those tanks to clean them out. With burst rinsing, we’ve changed this to 30-second spurts, and that can save up to 30 million litres annually.

PEPSICO'S KEY FIGURES

PepsiCo's 100% replenishment target encompasses both its own operations and its bottlers.

How does PepsiCo reuse water within its factories?

Many of our sites treat process water for reuse. Typically, we use membrane bioreactors (MBR) combined with a reverse osmosis (RO) treatment system. This would typically allow us to recover around 60-70% of our freshwater intake.

We’re looking at optimising our potato washing processes in our food business. There, we are recycling the water used to rinse our sliced potatoes to wash our incoming potatoes. It’s a first-use / last-use type of process, which we do with our clean-in-place (CIP) systems as well.

We also source recycled water from our ingredients. Potatoes typically contain around 80% water, and when you put them through a fryer, that water is released as vapour. Our teams have figured out a way to recover that water vapour, treat it, and then bring it back into the system for reuse. That saves about up to 60 million litres per plant annually. This loops back to that recon system that I mentioned earlier. When your employees are aware of the need, they begin looking for opportunity, and this is a classic example of how those dots get drawn together.

There are also some regulatory barriers which limit water reuse in some regions. I think sometimes that's a combination of regulation not keeping up with the pace of technology. Within PepsiCo, we’ve imposed some limitations on where we can use recovered and recycled water. For example, we do not use it as an ingredient or for product contact.

Is PepsiCo piloting any new water technologies?

On the food side, we are piloting a new corn washing technology which started out in the US and proved successful. We are now rolling that out to about 100 of our snacks factories and that’s saving around 640 million litres of water annually.

Another interesting one uses machine learning to improve water efficiency. We’ve piloted Wint, which is a technology used for leak detection and process optimisation. It’s really a way to take the responsibility of that away from our operators and have an intelligent system that can pick up any sort of abnormality in our process and flag it to those operators very quickly, versus them having to do it through a walk around process.

We are also working with a number of universities to look at new technologies. For example, adiabatic cooling — how do we move away from water cooling to air cooling? Also, atmospheric water collection and all those types of new innovative ways of looking at water sourcing.

Does PepsiCo have specific challenges that currently can’t be solved with existing water technologies?

I think one technology gap that exists is trying to find that holy grail low-energy desalination-type technology, which would obviously benefit lots of users besides PepsiCo. With the membranes of today, we can’t really economically reclaim the last 10% of wastewater treatment, such as concentrated brines. Generally speaking, that requires very energy-intensive systems like evaporation or crystallisation.

CHAMPIONING CIRCULARITY

The Vallejo plant in Mexico is a flagship water circularity project, cutting reliance on municipal water sources by harnessing rainwater harvesting and reusing water from nearby bottling facilities.

Some of PepsiCo’s sites in South America have been able to run without freshwater. How have you achieved this and how will you replicate these successes in other locations?

Mexico City is a massively water-stressed area, and our Vallejo site was trying to figure out how we can extract the most value out of every single drop onsite. Rainwater harvesting was one way to augment freshwater supply, and another element was importing processed water from other factories.

We took water from one of our bottling partners fulfilling about 30% of our site’s water requirements. Essentially, we brought in the bottler’s used process water out of their treatment plant and pushed it through our MBR and RO technology to get it back to potable water standards. We could then reuse it within our system.

We are slowly pushing bits and pieces of this approach into different operations, particularly within Latin America. There are limitations, however. Firstly, we need a site that has a very advanced water treatment system. We also need a third-party that can supply us with a certain quality of used processed water, and there won’t necessarily be a PepsiCo bottler in every city which we can obtain used water from.

How is PepsiCo planning to meet its replenishment targets and are you facing any challenges here?

We’re doing really well with our replenishment. We are on target to hopefully hit our 100% replenishment by 2025 goal this year, and that’s due to us pushing a number of projects globally across a range of interventions, from reforestation and wetland restoration to irrigation upgrades. We've got about 48 projects now in play, and last year we replenished around 24 billion litres of water. Because we cap each location’s water replenishment at 100% of its water use, only 13 billion litres of this volume counts against our 2025 and 2030 replenishment ambitions.

We are starting to discover co-benefits with our replenishment projects. A lot of these projects have more outcomes than purely water replenishment. There could be water quality benefits, economic benefits, carbon sequestration benefits and biodiversity benefits.

The first challenge in meeting our replenishment goal tends to be finding the right partners and projects, which is not necessarily as straightforward as we'd like it to be. An interesting thing with the replenishment projects we have in place is that climate change has quite a role to play, and that sometimes means overachieving to provide a buffer to compensate for any sort of impact climate change may have on our projects. For example, shifting rainfall patterns, mean suddenly having to figure out how to increase the scale of these projects to meet our targets because what was replenished now is a lot less than it was before. The way we are approaching this is to make sure that we are very agile in terms of how we put these projects in place.