Ramon Laguarta
Ramon Laguarta is a Spanish business executive who has served as chief executive officer of PepsiCo since October 2018 and as chairman of its board since February 2019. He succeeded Indra Nooyi, who had led the company for twelve years, and is the sixth chief executive in PepsiCo's history.
PepsiCo is among the largest food and beverage companies in the world, with a portfolio spanning carbonated soft drinks, sports drinks, snacks, cereals and convenience foods. It is distinguished from its principal beverage competitor, Coca-Cola, by the fact that roughly half its revenue comes from food rather than drink, principally through the Frito-Lay and Quaker businesses.
Early life and education
Laguarta was born in 1963 or 1964 in Barcelona, Spain. He studied business administration at ESADE Business School in Barcelona and subsequently took a master's degree in international management at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona.
Career
Early career
Laguarta began his career at the Spanish confectionery company Chupa Chups, working in international markets, which gave him early experience of taking a European brand into unfamiliar territories.
PepsiCo
He joined PepsiCo in 1996 in a corporate strategy role in Europe and spent more than two decades rising through the company's international operations, a background that distinguishes him from most American consumer goods chief executives, who typically come up through the domestic business.
He held general management positions in Iberia, led the company's Eastern European operations, and in 2015 became chief executive of the Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa sector, a territory covering a very large number of markets at widely differing stages of development. He was appointed president of PepsiCo in 2017, a position that identified him as the intended successor, and became chief executive on 3 October 2018.
Strategy
Laguarta's strategic framework was initially expressed as Faster, Stronger, Better: to accelerate growth by investing in brands and capability, to strengthen the organisation through culture and capability, and to do so while improving the company's environmental and social performance.
Three practical changes have characterised the period.
The first is investment in the core. Laguarta reversed a long pattern of cost reduction at the expense of brand support, increasing advertising and capital expenditure substantially in the belief that the company's largest brands had been underfunded. Capital investment rose sharply in manufacturing capacity, in the direct store delivery network that distributes snacks, and in digital systems.
The second is portfolio reshaping. PepsiCo has acquired businesses in growing categories and disposed of those in declining ones. It bought SodaStream in 2018 for about US$3.2 billion, Rockstar Energy for US$3.85 billion in 2020, the Chinese snack company Be & Cheery in the same year, the Mexican-American food brand Siete Foods for US$1.2 billion in 2024, and the prebiotic soda brand poppi in 2025 for approximately US$1.95 billion. It sold a controlling interest in the Tropicana, Naked and other juice brands to PAI Partners in 2021 for about US$3.3 billion, exiting a category in which consumption had been declining for years.
The third is pep+, announced in September 2021 and standing for PepsiCo Positive. It is a restatement of the company's strategy around sustainability, covering agricultural sourcing, packaging, water use, emissions and the nutritional composition of the portfolio, and is unusual in being presented as the business strategy rather than as a separate programme alongside it. Targets have included regenerative agriculture across the company's agricultural footprint, net zero emissions by 2040 and substantial reductions in virgin plastic use, several of which were subsequently revised or extended as the wider corporate retreat from such commitments occurred.
Difficulties
The period since 2022 has been considerably harder than the one before it.
Inflation allowed PepsiCo to raise prices substantially, and it did so more aggressively than most competitors, which protected margins and revenue for two years. The consequence, visible from 2024, was that volumes fell as consumers, particularly lower-income American households, reduced purchases or moved to cheaper alternatives. The company's snack business, historically the most reliable part of it, recorded successive quarters of volume decline.
Health has become a more direct commercial problem than at any previous point. The growth of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist medicines for weight reduction, which suppress appetite and reduce consumption of exactly the categories PepsiCo sells, has been treated by investors as a structural threat. Separately, political attention in the United States to ultra-processed foods and to additives has produced pressure to reformulate products, and the company has announced the removal of artificial colours and flavours from several brands.
Quaker Oats recalled a substantial range of granola products in December 2023 and again in January 2024 following salmonella contamination at a plant in Illinois, which was subsequently closed. The recall cost the business a significant part of a year's sales in the affected categories.
Activist investment: in 2025 the hedge fund Elliott Management disclosed a substantial stake and published a critique arguing that the company's margins had deteriorated, that the beverage business in North America should be restructured or refranchised to independent bottlers, and that the international business was undermanaged. The company announced a review of its portfolio and cost structure.
Approach
Laguarta is regarded as a considerably less public figure than his predecessor, whose profile extended well beyond the company. His emphasis has been operational and internal, and he has spoken about giving country and category managers greater autonomy, on the reasoning that a company operating in two hundred markets cannot be run centrally.
His international background is reflected in the weight given to markets outside the United States, which have grown faster than the domestic business throughout his tenure and now represent a substantially larger share of volume, particularly in India, Mexico, Brazil and across Africa and the Middle East.
Context: the food and beverage industry
PepsiCo's position illustrates the pressures facing large packaged food companies generally.
The industry's twentieth-century model depended on national brands supported by mass advertising, distributed through a small number of large retailers, with steady volume growth from population and income. Each element of that has weakened. Retailers' own brands have improved and taken share, particularly in inflationary periods. Media fragmentation has made mass advertising less efficient. Volume growth in developed markets has ceased, so revenue growth must come from price or from emerging markets. And consumer attitudes towards sugar, salt, fat and processing have shifted in a direction that is unfavourable to most of the portfolio.
The responses available are limited and all are being pursued: raise prices and accept volume loss; acquire brands in growing categories, usually at high multiples; reformulate existing products, which risks the taste that made them successful; and expand in markets where incomes are rising and consumption per head is still low.
PepsiCo's particular advantage in this environment is its snack business. Frito-Lay operates a direct store delivery system in which the company's own staff deliver to and stock the shelves of hundreds of thousands of outlets, which is enormously expensive to replicate and which gives it a degree of control over shelf space that few competitors possess. That system is the principal reason the company's profitability has historically exceeded that of comparable food businesses.
Assessment
Laguarta inherited a company in good condition and has run it through a considerably more difficult environment than his predecessor faced.
The decisions that can be assessed favourably include the increase in brand and capital investment after a long period of underinvestment, the disposal of the juice business before the category declined further, and the emphasis on international markets, which has been the company's principal source of growth.
The criticisms are the ones Elliott Management articulated and that had been made more quietly before: that the aggressive pricing of 2022 and 2023 protected reported results at the cost of losing consumers who have not returned; that the North American beverage business has persistently lower margins than Coca-Cola's, which operates an asset-light model with independent bottlers; and that the company's cost base grew during the years when revenue growth made it easy not to notice.
The larger question is structural and not his to solve alone. A company whose products are principally sweet, salty and processed faces a generational change in how such products are regarded, reinforced by a class of medicines that reduces the desire for them. PepsiCo's answer, to reformulate, to diversify into categories perceived as healthier and to grow where consumption per head is still rising, is the same answer every competitor is giving, and whether it is sufficient will not be clear for some years.