PepsiCo is a widely held public company, owned by its shareholders. Its 2026 proxy statement names only two holders above 5%: The Vanguard Group with 10.1% and BlackRock with 8.2%. The percentages use shares outstanding at the 26 February 2026 record date; the share counts come from the funds’ own 13G filings, dated 30 May 2025 for Vanguard and 31 December 2023 for BlackRock. PepsiCo in turn owns its brands, including Pepsi-Cola, Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, Gatorade, Mountain Dew, Quaker and SodaStream. The company was formed in 1965 when Pepsi-Cola merged with Frito-Lay, and it reported net revenue of $93.9 billion for fiscal 2025.
The proxy credits Vanguard with 137.7 million shares and BlackRock with 111.8 million. Both are asset managers whose stakes come from the funds and accounts they run.
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No one else above 5%
The proxy's table of owners above 5% lists only those two names. All other shareholders, including directors and officers, sit below that line.
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PepsiCo owns the brands
Brands sit inside PepsiCo's six reportable segments. Some drinks it sells are licensed or distributed for others: the 10-K names Dr Pepper and Schweppes licensed from Keurig Dr Pepper in some markets, and Celsius distributed in certain channels.
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Built by mergers
Pepsi-Cola and Frito-Lay merged in 1965 to form PepsiCo. Quaker Oats, which brought Gatorade, joined through a merger on 2 August 2001.
What changed in 2025-26
Buying newer brands
In 2025 PepsiCo paid $1.95 billion in net cash for poppi, a prebiotic soda, and $1.2 billion for Siete, a Mexican-American foods business, according to its 10-K. In December 2024 it had bought Strauss Group’s 50% of Sabra.
Fiscal 2025 net revenue rose 2% to $93.9 billion, but operating profit fell 11% to $11.5 billion. The 10-K cites cost increases, impairment charges on the Rockstar brand, lower organic volume and higher commodity costs.
Snacks earn, drinks struggle
PepsiCo Foods North America made $6.2 billion of segment operating profit on $27.5 billion of revenue in fiscal 2025. PepsiCo Beverages North America made $1.1 billion on $28.2 billion, after $1.5 billion of impairment and other charges.
AI shopping agents as a risk
The 10-K lists the use of artificial intelligence shopping agents that autonomously select products that may not be ours among shifts in channel preferences. It also names investment in AI and data analytics for consumer insight as a priority.
Main brands or scopeConvenient foods in China, Australia, New Zealand and India
What it means for you
Check the 5% table in each year's proxy before quoting PepsiCo's owners; it is the only disclosed list.
Read the segment table, not the headline: revenue is split evenly between food and drinks in North America, profit is not.
If you build a challenger drink or snack brand, note that PepsiCo now buys them: poppi and Siete were both 2025 deals.
If you sell to PepsiCo or its retailers, track the AI-agent risk it names: product data has to be readable by a machine.
Investors: Vanguard and BlackRock are asset managers holding for their funds and clients, not strategic owners.
The Business Engineer lens
PepsiCo’s largest holders are asset managers, and it is run as a portfolio of brands whose profit comes mostly from North American snacks. The Business Engineer view is that AI shopping agents test brand-led distribution, and PepsiCo itself now names that risk in its annual report.
The complete explainer, cleaned up and reformatted for mobile.
In short
PepsiCo is widely held. Its only holders above 5% are Vanguard (10.1%) and BlackRock (8.2%), according to its 2026 proxy. PepsiCo in turn owns its brands outright, including Pepsi, Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, Gatorade, Mountain Dew and Quaker. It made $93.9 billion of net revenue in 2025.
Correction (10 Oct 2026): an earlier version of this page listed State Street, Geode and Fidelity with exact stakes and undated market-cap and employee figures. PepsiCo’s 2026 proxy lists only Vanguard (10.1%) and BlackRock (8.2%) above 5%; financials now come from its 2025 10-K.
How we source: figures on this page come from the company’s own filings (SEC 10-K, 10-Q, prospectus and earnings releases, or its annual report), with the period stated next to each number; outside estimates appear only labelled, with their source and date. Last refreshed October 2026. Our methodology.
Fiscal 2025 ended 27 December 2025. Segment operating profit before corporate costs.
Who owns PepsiCo?
PepsiCo, Inc. is a public company with no controlling shareholder. Its 2026 proxy statement lists two holders of more than 5%: The Vanguard Group with 137.7 million shares (10.1%) and BlackRock with 111.8 million (8.2%), both largely on behalf of index funds. Everyone else owns less than 5%.
What PepsiCo owns
PepsiCo owns its brands, and its 10-K lists the biggest: Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew, Quaker and SodaStream. It reports six segments. In 2025, PepsiCo Beverages North America brought in $28.2 billion and PepsiCo Foods North America (Frito-Lay and Quaker) $27.5 billion, followed by Europe, Middle East and Africa at $18.0 billion and Latin America Foods at $10.5 billion (10-K).
By revenue, PepsiCo looks evenly split between drinks and food in North America. By profit it is not: in 2025, Foods North America earned $6.2 billion of segment operating profit on $27.5 billion of revenue, while Beverages North America earned $1.1 billion on $28.2 billion, weighed down by a $1.5 billion of impairment and other charges. Frito-Lay’s scale in salty snacks is the economic core; the drinks business is where the strategic questions sit.
What to watch
North American beverage margins and any portfolio changes
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
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