When Jim VandeHei brought him onstage, Ramón Laguarta opened with a joke. He had thought the audience was there to hear him until he saw that Matt Damon was also among the speakers.
The conversation then turned to a slogan PepsiCo had been using for some time: faster, stronger, better. VandeHei asked him what exactly that “better” meant.
Laguarta’s answer was considerably less promotional than might have been expected. He talked about growth, but not at any cost. For a company of that size, he said, being able to sustain that growth over time also matters.
That is where a part of PepsiCo’s business that tends to sit behind the brands comes into view.
Today, the company is more heavily weighted toward food than beverages and works with around fifty different crops worldwide. That is why, when Laguarta talks about soil, water or agriculture, he does not frame them only as environmental issues. He also looks at them from a business perspective: if those conditions deteriorate, sooner or later production becomes more difficult.
Later, VandeHei changed the subject and turned to the size of the company.
He said Axios has around five hundred people and that it is already difficult to keep everyone moving in the same direction. PepsiCo, by contrast, has close to 300,000 employees.
The comparison was that managing something like that was similar to moving a city.
Laguarta agreed, although he added that, in his case, that city is spread around the world.
At that scale, he acknowledges, direct management does not exist. There is no meeting, email or presentation capable of reaching everyone in the same way. His job is more about making sure people understand where the company is going and have enough information to make decisions without waiting for instructions from above.
He often explains it with a simple calculation.
If each of those 300,000 employees manages to make four slightly better decisions per day because they have better information, PepsiCo ends up accumulating more than a million better decisions in a single day.
Laguarta is 63 and joined PepsiCo in 1996 to work in snack marketing in Spain. Since then, he has spent his entire career within the company.
He was born in Barcelona in 1963, studied at ESADE and later completed his education in Arizona. Before that, he had worked at Chupa Chups, where he was involved in expanding the brand in Asia and the United States.
Within PepsiCo, he worked in Greece and Cyprus, returned to Spain and later took on commercial responsibilities for Europe. He then worked with developing markets and participated in the acquisition of a Russian dairy and juice company for around $5.4 billion, one of the largest acquisitions in the group’s history.
Between 2015 and 2017, he led Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. He later became president of the company and, in October 2018, succeeded Indra Nooyi as CEO. He was the sixth executive to hold the position and the first Spaniard to take charge of a major U.S. multinational.
He speaks six languages and has worked on five continents.
In recent years, one of the areas that has changed the most within PepsiCo has been technology.
Laguarta acknowledges that just five years ago the company still did not think about data with the strategic importance it has today. Nor did they imagine the extent to which it would become part of the competition among major consumer-goods companies.
The change began with fairly basic issues: systems, infrastructure, migration to the cloud and training.
More advanced tools came later.
PepsiCo also decided to centralize much of that process. Tests may take place in different markets or business areas, but before a technology is extended to the rest of the company, PepsiCo analyzes whether it really works and whether it justifies the investment.
That led, among other things, to work with Nvidia and Siemens to develop digital twins of its plants, of which there are more than a thousand worldwide. Those models make it possible to simulate how a production line operates and anticipate problems before they force it to stop.
As that transformation progressed, other, far more immediate problems emerged.
In September 2025, Elliott Investment Management announced an investment of around $4 billion in PepsiCo, close to 2% of the company.
The fund accompanied the investment with a 75-page presentation questioning several aspects of management. Among other things, it argued that PepsiCo was trading more like Kraft Heinz than Coca-Cola, that it had 70% more products despite generating 15% lower retail sales, and that its multiple was at its lowest level in at least twenty years.
Laguarta avoided a public confrontation.
During the first earnings call after the announcement, he described the conversations with Elliott as constructive and pointed to one area of agreement: he also believed PepsiCo was worth more than its share price reflected.
In December, the company announced a series of changes.
The plan included reducing by around 20% the number of products sold in the United States, seeking new productivity savings, reviewing the North American supply chain and refreshing part of the board. Elliott supported the measures and did not obtain seats on the board.
A month earlier, the closure of three Frito-Lay plants had already been announced.
In February 2026, a much more visible change arrived for consumers: PepsiCo cut prices on Lay’s and Doritos by as much as 15%.
The decision came after several years in which the industry had followed the opposite path and passed much of the inflation on to consumers through higher prices.
The problem was that consumers were beginning to buy less.
When Liz Claman interviewed him after the release of the quarterly results, Laguarta began by discussing global performance. Snack volumes had grown by around 3% and beverages by approximately 2%.
Then he turned to the United States.
He said they were not satisfied with what they were seeing.
In North America, food volumes had remained virtually unchanged and beverage volumes had fallen 4%, even with the new pricing policies already in place.
Among the reasons, he mentioned a very concrete one: gasoline prices.
Gas stations and convenience stores are important channels for PepsiCo, particularly for impulse purchases of beverages and snacks. When the cost of filling the tank rises, consumers have less money left for those purchases.
The company then began working with those retailers on promotions combining fuel, beverages and food.
The situation outside the United States was different. The international business had been growing steadily at between 5% and 6%, and during the first half of 2026 global revenue increased by around 7%.
Laguarta often points to those figures to argue that some parts of the business have begun to recover, even though North America remains the main problem.
What PepsiCo sells is changing as well.
During an internal conversation, with a bag of Doritos on the table, he was asked what excited him most about the new portfolio.
Laguarta talked about consumers paying increasing attention to labels and wanting to understand better what they are eating. That is why he mentioned protein, fiber, prebiotics, foods with greater nutritional density and new hydration options.
But he also placed a limit on that trend: not everything is going to become health food. The same person who wants better ingredients also wants, from time to time, to eat something simply because they enjoy it. PepsiCo is trying to find a place between those two things.
And when Laguarta steps away for a moment from results, technology and products, another subject almost always appears: football.
He played from a young age in Spain and jokes that today he does considerably more walking than playing.
He is a Barcelona supporter, although when he talks about the club he is especially interested in its youth academy. He likes the idea of developing players within the institution itself, helping them grow and giving them opportunities over time.
That way of thinking also appears when he talks about PepsiCo.
His own career is a fairly obvious example: he joined in 1996 to work in snack marketing in Spain and eventually rose to lead the entire company.
In June, a few weeks before the quarterly results were released, Claman asked him about a match Spain was due to play the following day at the World Cup.
Laguarta said he would watch it at home with his children and some friends and that there would be Lay’s and Pepsi on the table.
He also admitted that he was nervous about the match.
