Ramon Laguarta
Analyst · Steve Powers of Deutsche Bank
That’s good question. Listen, I think, we’re happy that we had that framework going into these pandemic, right, both The PepsiCo Way is with very clear behaviors for our people and has helped us a lot in managing through the pandemic, especially when we have now a more kind of empower organization making more decisions in the frontline. And they have a very, I think, good framework clarity on what’s expected, and that – and that’s helping us perform. In terms of the three vectors you were referring to the fastest, stronger, better, we’re happy with the faster. Clearly, we’re becoming more competitive in the marketplace. As we look into the future, I think, we – the – we’re going to have to probably go more after drivers of share, because categories might slowdown a little bit. So I think innovation brands, execution will play a very high role in trying to capture that market share. When you look at the stronger, we had some, obviously, it was part of the agenda to invest in becoming a much better omni-channel company, right? So e-commerce was big. Supply chain flexibility was big to enable that omni-channel. Obviously, I mean, the – what’s happened that you saw the numbers, the penetration of e-commerce or e-grocery is just accelerated by three years now. So we had forecasted to be three, four years from now, it’s happening now. So that is a big focus of the organization, how do we accelerate the pivot into the omni-channel much faster, which means that, we’re going to have to hop some of the capabilities that, that we have. I think we’ve made great progress in how we deal with consumer data and how we have much more performance marketing, we improve in a lot of the – those capabilities, creating internal content, all that is happening on the flexibility of the supply chain as well. I think we were lucky that we made a lot of investments in additional capacity last year, and that’s helping us this year, big time and helping us to have more flexibility. So good progress there. I think, we need to pivot with more of a sense of urgency. The other area where we’re doubling down is what we call holistic cost management. Holistic cost management was a capability we had. But clearly, we need more of that in terms of being able to repurpose money from one part of the P&L to another part of P&L. And where we have inefficiencies to get rid of those inefficiencies to reinvest back, where the – where we’re going to get the best ROI in terms of growth and flow through. So that, that capability, I think, we’ve made good progress. That’s another area where we put in a lot of emphasis. On the better side, I would say, the social consciousness. I mean, the need for becoming much more of a social company, no social company, but social aware company, both in terms of the environment and the inequalities, I think, has also increased, given the pandemic. So you saw, we increased the foundation funding. We’re also quite focused on improving all our environmental footprint. So those are areas that more than changing the trajectory is more a sense of urgency to get them done earlier, as the consumer and society is expecting us to, I think, go faster in those areas.