PepsiCo's DEI Rollback: Supplier Diversity and Goals Scaled Back

PepsiCo has been a prominent corporate DEI participant for more than a decade. The company published annual workforce diversity data under its Pep+ sustainability framework, set aspirational hiring targets, and ran a supplier diversity program that directed procurement toward minority-owned and women-owned businesses. In early 2025, PepsiCo scaled back those programs.

The changes were reported by Bloomberg and Axios as part of the broader wave of corporate DEI rollbacks that accelerated from late 2024 through early 2025. PepsiCo's announcement was less prominent than Amazon's or Target's, no CEO blog post, no press conference, but the scope of the changes was significant.

Key findings

• PepsiCo scaled back DEI programs in early 2025, per Bloomberg and Axios reporting.
• Changes included ending some supplier diversity requirements and reducing the scope of external diversity reporting.
• PepsiCo withdrew from some external DEI benchmarking surveys.
• The company had published annual workforce demographic data and supplier diversity metrics through its Pep+ sustainability framework.
• PepsiCo's rollback was part of a wave affecting Target, Amazon, Google, Walmart, Ford, and others in the same period.
• PepsiCo had received multiple "Best Company for Diversity" and similar designations from external organizations in prior years.

What DEI programs did PepsiCo end in 2025?

PepsiCo's supplier diversity program is worth attention because it directs real procurement dollars. A large CPG company with $91 billion in revenue runs supply chains for ingredients, packaging, manufacturing equipment, logistics, and services. A supplier diversity requirement specifying that a percentage of that spending must go to minority-owned, women-owned, or other certified diverse suppliers can represent hundreds of millions of dollars in directed procurement annually.

That's a different magnitude of DEI commitment than internal hiring goals. It's market access for smaller businesses that typically struggle to win corporate procurement contracts. Ending supplier diversity requirements doesn't just change an internal metric, it changes who gets the contracts.

The Pep+ framework

PepsiCo's Pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) framework, launched in 2021, integrated sustainability, diversity, and ESG commitments into a unified strategic framework. CEO Ramon Laguarta presented Pep+ as a reinvention of PepsiCo's business model, aligning corporate activities with planetary and human sustainability. DEI was embedded in Pep+ as a core component.

Pep+'s integration of DEI into the strategic framework rather than as a standalone program had two implications. First, it was harder to isolate and discontinue without visibly disrupting other Pep+ commitments. Second, when the DEI components were scaled back in 2025, the framing was a "recalibration of priorities" rather than an outright DEI program termination, which is why PepsiCo's rollback received less press attention than Amazon's or Target's direct statements.

The consumer-base consideration

PepsiCo's brands have broad consumer bases across demographic groups. Its customer profile is not narrowly aligned with any political constituency, which creates a different risk calculation than, say, Bud Light or Target. Neither the organized DEI-opposition campaigns nor the organized DEI-defense campaigns have the same concentrated pull over a company whose customers span the income and political spectrum.

That consumer-base breadth makes PepsiCo's rollback less a response to direct consumer pressure and more a response to the federal contractor and legal environment, shareholder pressure, and industry-peer behavior. When Amazon, Walmart, and Target all rolled back DEI programs in a compressed window, the cost of not rolling back, in terms of activist shareholder attention and potential legal exposure, changed the calculus for companies like PepsiCo that weren't under immediate consumer pressure.

The competitive and supplier context

PepsiCo operates in more than 200 countries and employs roughly 318,000 people. The brands include Pepsi, Lay's, Gatorade, Quaker, Doritos, and Mountain Dew, each individually larger than most companies. When a company at that scale runs a supplier diversity program and then discontinues it, the downstream effect isn't a rounding error.

The specific mechanism: large corporations run procurement programs where approved suppliers bid for contracts covering ingredients, packaging, logistics, and services. When PepsiCo designates a percentage of that spend for minority-owned or women-owned businesses, it creates a pipeline for companies that typically lack the established relationships to win Fortune 100 procurement otherwise. Ending that requirement doesn't just change a metric inside PepsiCo's ESG report. It closes a door those suppliers spent years getting through.

DiversityInc., the organization that publishes an annual ranking of corporate diversity programs, had placed PepsiCo near the top of its lists for multiple years before 2025. The HRC Corporate Equality Index consistently scored Citi and comparable CPG companies high. Those rankings have real recruiting value, particularly for attracting mid-career professionals from underrepresented groups who use them as a proxy for employer culture.

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo's primary direct competitor, maintained its DEI programs through the 2024-2025 rollback wave without announcing changes comparable to PepsiCo's. In markets where both companies recruit from the same professional talent pool, Coca-Cola's maintained position and PepsiCo's scaled-back one send different signals about workplace culture. That competitive gap in DEI positioning is new, and its effect on talent acquisition won't be visible in the same reporting that disclosed the DEI programs themselves.

Pep+'s 2021 integration of DEI into a broader sustainability framework also created a specific rollback challenge: because DEI was woven into the framework rather than organized as a standalone program, the 2025 changes affected supplier relationships, reporting commitments, and external benchmark participations simultaneously. Each of those audiences, diverse suppliers, ESG investors, benchmarking organizations, processed the same changes through a different lens. The "recalibration of priorities" framing covered all of them at once, which is probably why PepsiCo's rollback received less press attention than Amazon's direct blog post.

The WokeCorp assessment

The commitment. PepsiCo's DEI programs, particularly supplier diversity, represented operationally meaningful investments with real beneficiaries. Workforce diversity goals produced annual accountability data across a decade of reporting.

The rollback. Early 2025 changes ended some supplier diversity requirements and narrowed external reporting. The lower visibility of PepsiCo's announcement compared to Amazon's or Target's reflects both the framing ("recalibration") and the company's relative distance from the direct consumer-pressure events of 2023–2024.

The pattern. PepsiCo's rollback confirms the wave's breadth: it isn't limited to companies that were directly targeted by organized pressure campaigns. It's a sector-wide reassessment driven by legal environment, federal contractor risk, and competitive-peer behavior.

See The Great DEI Retreat: Corporate Rollbacks in 2024-2025 for the broader context.

Related reading

• The Great DEI Retreat: Corporate Rollbacks in 2024-2025, the broad pattern
• Amazon's DEI Rollback: Andy Jassy Ends the Programs, the most prominent announcement in the wave
• Citigroup's DEI Rollback, the financial services parallel

Sources

• PepsiCo Inc., Annual Report Form 10-K FY2024. Verified June 2026.
• Bloomberg reporting on PepsiCo DEI changes, early 2025. Verified June 2026.
• Axios reporting on corporate DEI rollbacks, 2025. Verified June 2026.
• PepsiCo Pep+ Sustainability Report 2023. Verified June 2026.