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PepsiCo owns more than 500 brands, but when asked to name them, only 21% of consumers can think of any aside from Pepsi. This startling fact is among the reasons why the food and beverage behemoth has been toiling away at a new logo, unveiled earlier today. The new badge dispenses with the multicolored globe floating to the left of the PepsiCo name, which had served the company from 2001 to 2025. In its place is a varicolored and thematically elaborate escutcheon that’s essentially the letter “P” emerging from a smile, framed by a leaf and a water droplet. The latter two symbols are readily decipherable: grains for the snacks and liquid for the beverages. The smile, meanwhile, stands for “customer-centricity,” according to the company. The new logo will begin appearing on product packaging next year and is already in place on the corporate website. PepsiCo also promised it will “come to life in a variety of ways” on social channels. Posting to LinkedIn, chief consumer and marketing officer Jane Wakely insisted that the new look “isn’t just a new logo,” but also “a symbol of transformation that captures the energy, optimism, and ambition of PepsiCo in 2025 and beyond.” In the same post, she acknowledged the significance of the finding that less than a quarter of consumers can name any PepsiCo brands aside from Pepsi. “It made us think,” she wrote. It remains to be seen how an updated logo might increase brand recall in a huge portfolio that includes both household names like Doritos and Mountain Dew and those further-afield, like Grandma’s Cookies and Brisk iced tea. Either way, PepsiCo is clearly moving from a “house of brands” model, where the holding company takes a back seat to the owned properties, to a “branded house” structure, in which the mother brand stands in front of the pack. FedEx is a good example; consumers are likely to be far more familiar with that name than with its business units like FedEx Ground and FedEx Office. In a company statement, PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta said that its “new identity” better represents PepsiCo as “a company with expansive reach.” To hammer the transformational point home, PepsiCo’s new emblem features three words along the bottom: “Food. Drinks. Smiles.” According to a fact sheet sent to ADWEEK, the trio of nouns “reinforce our mission: creating more smiles with every sip and every bite.” The device harkens back to 1990, when McDonald’s adopted the slogan “Food, Folks, and Fun” as part of its ongoing effort to frame itself as more than a fast-food joint.
