For decades, small business owners across the US have stocked their shelves with popular products from iconic brands such as Pepsi, Lay’s, and Gatorade. But until recently, many of these mom-and-pop stores, restaurants, and local establishments were still paying for their PepsiCo deliveries with paper checks—an outdated, slow process that sapped valuable staff resources.

In an era of digital transformation, PepsiCo faced a difficult challenge: its Away From Home division, responsible for supplying these businesses, needed to modernize its payment technology without losing legacy customers.

Typically store managers handed their checks to a PepsiCo delivery driver, who then personally couriered the payments to the finance team for processing. In 2024, the team opted to implement Stripe Payments and launch an app, enabling customers to place orders and pay online in a few clicks.

For a global enterprise such as PepsiCo—with roots dating back to 1898 and a workforce of more than 300,000—this type of change is no small feat. Transitioning a huge number of customers from an analog payment process to a modern solution requires tremendous care and attention to detail. PepsiCo chose Stripe’s technology to help ease the transition. Stripe enabled the company to rapidly launch PepsiCoPartners.com and the PepsiConnect app, effectively bringing restaurants, casinos, and hotels that PepsiCo has partnered with for decades out of the analog world within seven months. These new platforms allow small business owners to preorder products with their credit card and make ad hoc purchases.

By integrating Payments into their web and mobile apps, the Away From Home team saved days of manual finance work every month, freed drivers from the responsibility and security challenges of delivering paper checks, and provided customers with more flexibility to make last-minute changes to their orders. With online payments powered by Stripe, customers can now even grab extra food or beverages directly off the truck at the time of delivery and update their orders in real time on the app.

To ensure a successful outcome, PepsiCo enlisted key partners throughout the Away From Home project. Cognizant, a global technology services company and Stripe partner, brought deep technical expertise and intimate knowledge of PepsiCo’s organizational structure to the table. The Cognizant team played a key role in helping integrate Stripe’s solutions into PepsiCo’s existing systems, particularly for the PepsiCoPartners.com platform and the PepsiConnect app. PepsiCo and Cognizant also tapped the expertise of Stripe’s professional services team, which helped PepsiCo and Cognizant maintain momentum with added project management, workshops, reporting, and ensuring the feasibility of technical features.

Ecommerce fuels customized Gatorade water bottle sales

Success with Stripe has encouraged PepsiCo to broaden its adoption of Stripe throughout the organization, powering other initiatives including ecommerce, direct-to-consumer, and in-person payments. For instance, Henry Mori, PepsiCo’s former VP of engineering, turned to Stripe after he and his team were tasked with upgrading Gatorade’s digital payments infrastructure as it piloted AI-driven initiatives.

In particular, Gatorade wanted to start selling its beloved retro green-and-orange bottles globally with options for AI personalization directly to consumers for the first time both online and via mobile, but it needed more robust payment capabilities to support this initiative. Gatorade was hearing too frequently that customers were experiencing friction upon checkout, and the team wanted to replace it with an easy, fast checkout experience. Another challenge was integrating new payment methods to ensure customers could check out with their preferred options, including digital wallets and local payment methods. And on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Gatorade’s ecommerce software crashed—leading to downtime, lost sales, and cascading errors.

Solving these challenges within Gatorade’s existing in-house solution would require up to a year of development and testing. Mori knew that implementing Stripe Payments would cut that time down to two months, leading to a faster launch and more revenue.

“A lot of people view payments as a cost center, but really, when harnessed correctly, it can be a huge growth driver because there’s a lot of innovation in payments,” said Mori. “You need a partner that can actually stay ahead of those changing regulations and consumer tastes, and make it seamless for you to adopt new features and offer those in turn to your consumers.”

The team partnered with Stripe professional services to implement Payments and Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite for a modern, sophisticated checkout experience that could help drive conversion across regions. The Optimized Checkout Suite includes embeddable UI components through Stripe Elements, dynamically presented payment methods, and Link—a wallet built by Stripe that enables customers to check out faster with their preferred payment method. This suite enabled PepsiCo to easily turn on popular payment methods through a single integration, such as BLIK and Przelewy24 in Poland, SEPA Direct Debit across Europe, BECS Direct Debit in Australia, ACH payments in the US, and digital wallets Apple Pay and Google Pay.

“For a company like PepsiCo with such a storied history and global reach, being able to offer consumers exactly what they need in their local market across the world means we’re looking at a huge opportunity to lift conversion at checkout, and in turn, drive meaningful revenue increases,” said Mori.

For more efficient financial operations and improved oversight, the PepsiCo team used Stripe Organizations, which provides a centralized way to manage multiple Stripe accounts in one place. By using Payments with Organizations to manage payments across several websites such as pantryshop.com, PepsiCo simplified tracking revenue, overseeing operations, managing user access, and coordinating payment flows—all from a single dashboard. This integration enables retailers and distributors to sell directly to customers in more than 20 markets around the world.

“What we’ve come to take for granted with Stripe is the flexibility and agility of being able to just switch on a payment method in a new market and go live that same day,” said Mori. “And that’s really where Stripe stands out—it’s able to meet PepsiCo’s needs on an agility standpoint.”

Stripe’s professional services team worked closely with the PepsiCo team to guide the technical integration—including the setup and configuration of Organizations to consolidate across additional brands such as Rockstar Energy Drink and SodaStream—and provide reporting and launch support.

Stripe enables in-person payments for quick launch of Tostitos food truck

After seeing the success Mori’s team had with Stripe, Tostitos’ marketing team recognized an opportunity to quickly test new business models. The team came up with a new plan for marketing its Tostitos products with a branded food truck at the 2025 Super Bowl.

For this initiative to succeed, a quick launch and frictionless customer experience at checkout was key. The staff would need to accept in-person payments quickly and keep the line moving, and they needed that solution in place in just five weeks for game day.

The team initially considered building their own payment solution, but they realized it would take far too long to meet the project’s ambitious timeline. Dheena Monte, IT marketing manager for PepsiCo North America, had been frustrated with previous payment solutions for decades. “The fintech industry in general doesn’t understand enterprise-level needs,” said Monte. “They’re very used to mid-market, startups, and SMBs, but there’s a different business model and set of needs with billion-dollar companies. PepsiCo, like a lot of enterprises, is a bunch of tiny little companies making up one giant company. Stripe understands that and came in at the right time.”

After evaluating Stripe’s capabilities, Monte’s team opted to implement Stripe Terminal and deploy a handheld payment experience with Stripe Reader S700 from the food truck window. Partnering with Stripe enabled the Tostitos team to rapidly transform an innovative concept into a creative, immersive experience for football fans. The truck delivered Tostitos-themed meals and snacks to thousands of fans with a simple tap of a credit card or mobile wallet, proving to be a popular attraction and generating notable fan engagement on social media.

“We could have built this solution internally, but finding the right partner was more efficient,” said Monte. “We’re a CPG company, not a finance company. This was supposed to be a three-month project—building the solution ourselves would have made it a three-year project.”

To test the food truck ahead of the Super Bowl, PepsiCo partnered with Turkois, a specialized software development firm and Stripe partner. With a tight three-week deadline before the first NFL game of the season, Turkois successfully created a custom POS application using Stripe’s S700 devices, complemented by a separate tablet for order management. This swift and effective implementation enabled the Tostitos team to conduct a successful trial run at a Dallas Cowboys football game prior to the 2025 Super Bowl.

Monte’s food truck experiment was so seamless, the Australia team is taking her playbook. “We would not have been able to pass the baton to Australia so quickly without Stripe being in the mix,” said Monte. “It helps with governance when we have a solution that works everywhere—we can templatize it and standardize it across the enterprise.”

A single, global solution enables PepsiCo to replicate modern payments across brands

Through its use of Stripe, PepsiCo has ushered in a new age of flexible, global payments across channels—supporting the company’s current and future goals. “Stripe’s roadmap just keeps improving,” said Mori. “It gives a lot of flexibility and many different models, so we can truly customize the suite to our business needs. Stripe being a digital-first company has enabled us to also lean into the digital-first footing with our consumers.”