Margaret Henry, who serves as Vice President of Sustainable and Regenerative Agriculture for PepsiCo, was born on a dairy farm in Kentucky. She has spent her life and career working to improve social, economic and environmental outcomes for rural communities around the world. She has a BA and BS from Brown University, training from Massachusetts Institute for Technology in System Dynamics and a Master’s Degree from Princeton University in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy.

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John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so honored to have with us today PepsiCo’s first time on the Impact Podcast. We’ve got Margaret Henry with us today. She’s the Vice President of Sustainable and Regenerative Agriculture at PepsiCo. Welcome, Margaret, to the Impact Podcast.

Margaret Henry: Thank you so much, John. It is a real honor to be here with you and with all of your listeners. Thanks for having me.

John: Of course. And before we get going into all the important and impactful things you’re doing in sustainability with your colleagues at PepsiCo, can you share a little bit about your background, Margaret—where you grew up and how you got on this very important journey that you’re on right now?

Margaret: I’m glad you asked because I think it’s a really good question for a lot of people looking at careers: Where am I now, and how do I get to where I want to be? I haven’t met a single person who said it was a straight line. I knew when I was a kid exactly what I wanted to do. I will say that I’ve taken a meandering path, but I’ve ended up a lot where I started. I grew up on a dairy farm in rural Kentucky, born and raised in really pretty rural Appalachia. The daily concerns that we were thinking about was: I was playing in the stream, I was jumping in the pond, and playing on the equipment on the farm. Was that stream clean? Was that equipment safe? Was that a farm a place that my parents wanted us kids to be running around on? And was it a farm that any of the kids would want to farm on? Those are the same things that all of the farmers who are at the origin of everything that PepsiCo puts into your pantry, are the same things they’re thinking about. And so when we’re thinking about sustainable and regenerative farming, it’s exactly the same things I was thinking about as a kid on the farm. It was about having a farm that has a community that’s thriving, that has an ecosystem that’s thriving, that has a future for that farm financially, socially, economically, everything. So I think I’ve gone through a lot of different iterations of who I wanted to be professionally. I’ve tried working with the non-governmental world. I’ve tried working with the government world, with the private sector world. I always gravitate back to agriculture and rural communities and how important they are to the food that we all put in our pantries and the food we all put in our bodies. And so I just love PepsiCo’s focus on that first mile on the earth that’s at the very beginning of our journey.

John: When I went to school there was no such thing really as how to learn to become a chief sustainability officer or environmental sciences. I wasn’t being taught at NYU when I was there. When you went to school, did you have the opportunity to get educated in some career path you’re going to be following in this space of regenerative agriculture?

Margaret: Well, I think the answer is different now than when both of us went to school, John. There are so many fantastic study programs that look at sustainability today or some aspect thereof. I studied international development, and that was sort of where I got the world is really complicated, people are complex, and geopolitical systems are complicated. I studied biology because I occasionally wanted there to be a right answer. I think sustainability today as it’s practiced really does bring those things together. There are correct answers in the research and the science. There’s also the human aspect to change in systems. My background wasn’t about how to do this in corporate sustainability, but any educational path that any one of you listeners choose can lead to things you never expected. Leaning in on where your interests are, which is what I did, and trying to have a diverse path will probably always serve you well if you continue to follow the passions and you have the North Star, which for me was about changing rural communities and ecosystems and trying to figure out how to make sure that those rural systems that we all rely on remain strong. Those are places that people want to live. Farming is a profession that people want to do, and the water that comes to those farms, the air that they breathe, the soil that they get into to plant their crops is healthy and is something that they can actually work on in the future. So didn’t study that academically. I have amazing agronomists on my team. PepsiCo has agronomists all over the world who know agronomy, went to school for agronomy. That’s phenomenal. Combine that with a little social science, combine that with financial acumen, you’ve got a real magic package.

John: I love it. Before we get going and talking about PepsiCo and all the great work you’re doing in regenerative agriculture and sustainability, let’s just talk about PepsiCo. Let’s reacquaint our listeners and viewers with PepsiCo. First of all, we know PepsiCo owns a great PepsiCo brand. Also Lay’s potato chips, Gatorade, Quaker,  SodaStream, just truth in advertising. On my desk is my little treat. When I want a little treat, this is my zero-sugar diet cherry. And then, of course, this is my go-to every day, which is the zero Gatorade. So I’m a huge PepsiCo fan. Besides that, the Closed Loop Fund is an investor in ERI, just for truth in advertising. The great Ron Gonen who founded the Closed Loop Fund has an all-star list and an all-star roster of really big and iconic brands that have invested in his fund, PepsiCo being one of them. And we’re really proud of that. It’s something to be proud of. PepsiCo has over $91 billion in revenue, over 318,000 employees, and serves people in over 200 countries. It’s a huge brand that you’re working for, Margaret.

Margaret: It sure is, which means there’s so much tremendous potential to really think about the way in which our business is making an impact on all the different communities that we touch.

John: True.

Margaret: We’re relying on 35 different agricultural crops and ingredients from over 60 different countries. That’s what’s behind the iconic products, and so agriculture is hugely important to what we do as a company. It’s hugely important to everything that’s in every single one of your pantries, in your refrigerators. That’s what I think about every day.

John: Well, I get to sit in Fresno, California, because I married a girl from Fresno. I married the raisin queen, who was then Tammy Bedrosian, who’s been Tammy Shegerian for 40 years. So I get to live in one of the big ag communities of America. Even though I grew up in New York City, we also had a farm in South New Jersey. And so I had the great opportunity to have the best of both worlds: the street and concrete of New York City, but have the beauty of a horse farm, among other types of farms—chicken farms and other types of farms—down in Toms River, New Jersey. So I dig when you say you grew up on a farm in rural Kentucky. By the way, I’m a big fan of Kentucky. I used to come down to Kentucky every year to look at racehorses and things of that sort. It’s truly what still makes America great in terms of our farming legacy and the legacy that we still have in agriculture and still get to share and highlight around the world. So this is a topic that’s near and dear to me. I’m so glad we’re chatting about it today. What year did you join PepsiCo, by the way?

Margaret: I’ve been with PepsiCo for 8 years now, since 2016.

John: So now you’re the Vice President of Sustainable and Regenerative Agriculture. Is that the role you started in? Where did you start, and how did that evolve?

Margaret: I started working on our U.S. work. The United States is a big part of our portfolio, but we have so much more beyond that. I did a lot of work with farmers in the United States, understanding what does it means to take our ambition that we have as PepsiCo—which is PepsiCo Positive, our sustainability plan. It’s really our end-to-end business transformation plan. Sustainability is at the center of it, but it’s about our whole business transformation. So I started in the United States, saying, “How do we do that? How do we bring that to life? What does it mean to the corn farmers in Illinois, the potato farmer in Oregon, Texas, or Florida that are growing these crops that end up in your Doritos and your Lay’s? What does sustainability as a business transformation mean to them?” And really deepened that partnership with some of those farmers who are more directly in our supply chains to say, “What’s keeping you up at night? What are your concerns? What are you worried about in being able to maintain your farm into the next generation?” That is what sustainability is at its core. And what are the risks that are coming at you? What’s keeping you up at night? Every single time we go out into a farming community, we’re seeing the impacts of climate change. We’re seeing the day-to-day realities of those risks. In my first job at PepsiCo, I was working with a group of corn farmers in Illinois, and we were talking about some of these regenerative practices, like cover crops. Instead of just filling up your soil and leaving it brown all winter long, what if you left something living that could grow all winter long? And some of the other farmers who had not been doing this—there was only one farmer doing it very much—said, “Well, the fields are so dirty all winter long, and I’m not sure. What about all the effort to plant that crop? What about when I want to go plant my soy or my corn the next year?” And then there was a drought. That one farmer who had been doing this—that corn stayed green. Everybody drove past that field and said, “Wow, maybe there’s something to this dirty field all winter long.” But, by golly, that was so brave of that farmer to be doing that. He showed up at church. He showed up at the grain store. For me, it was always the grain store [inaudible] that’s where everybody sat and talked and gossiped about each other’s fields. And he heard, “Your field is dirty.” That was so brave to try those practices. And then there was that drought. Now he’s the hero, and everyone’s saying, “Can you tell me a little bit more about that? What did you do? How did that work? Why do you think that cover crop helped your corn stay green through that drought?” And so that’s the kind of risk that all of our farmers are facing. Is it a drought? Is it a flood? Is it a derecho? Is it earlier frost? Is it later frost? There’s change happening that’s very hard. Farmers are operating their businesses on a really tight margin. And so, if we as PepsiCo can help to understand what those risks are—that’s what I did in my first job. And then, how are we part of the solution? How can we bring the right kinds of partnerships to those other farmers in Illinois to help them feel a little more confident going to church, to have the right agronomy to try planting that cover crop, to have financial access to finances from PepsiCo to help in that transition? Then PepsiCo claims sustainable, regenerative ingredients. Those farmers have a stronger farm. They have a more resilient future for everything they want to do on their enterprise. So that’s how I got started at PepsiCo. And that’s really been the ethos that we put in place across the world in many different ways because the risks are localized. We’ve got global goals, but our impact is always local to the local communities. And we’re trying to work on issues that matter most to them.

John: So let me just review Pep+ is your beautiful background you have today. It means PepsiCo Positive—that’s the transformation, the evolution of PepsiCo as a whole. Subset it into the ag sector, which you work on. There’s about 60 or so key ingredients or products into all of PepsiCo’s products that you get to work in all those different subsectors. All 60 you get to cover with the practice of sustainability and regenerative agriculture.

Margaret: It is indeed. We get to focus on about 60 countries [crosstalk] and [inaudible] 35 major ingredients.

John: Awesome.

Margaret: You’re thinking of some of the big ones—potatoes, corn, wheat, and oats, quite a few others—but that’s a good little sampling.

John: So from where you sit with the 60 countries and the 35 or so products, you get to do this. Let’s just say, the fun part is when they talk about Jordan and Brady and all the GOATs that exist out there, when they boil down their success, it boils down to two words: pattern recognition. Because of doing something not 10,000 times, 30, 40,000 times, over and over again. So, in theory, you’re saying on a macro basis, you get to be in this unique, fascinating, and critical position of the 60 different countries and the 35 different products, and as a clearinghouse of information, all these different farmers get to then share best practices among them all because of what you’re learning on a regular and dynamic basis as well.

Margaret: Absolutely. And not just the farmers that we touch with our sourcing, but also so many of our peer companies, we’re working with governments, we’re working with our suppliers, we’re working with our customers. There are hundreds and hundreds of PepsiCo associates who are out there really engaging with the community far beyond just what we purchased. And that’s the goal.

John: So then, define for our listeners and viewers, the terminology as you want it defined: What does regenerative agriculture truly mean to the classic definition to Pep+ and PepsiCo?

Margaret: It’s a good question. For us, regenerative agriculture is a way of farming that focuses on creating positive impacts. ‘Impacts.’ We do it with techniques that focus on reversing the degradation of soil, improving soil health, trying to help improve climate resilience, while helping to grow enough food to feed a growing population. So if you look at that and you say, “What is it in different places?” it’ll look a little bit different, but that’s the core definition that we lean into. I just want to emphasize that word “impacts.” Even last year, we were supporting farmers to spread the adoption of regenerative practices on 1.8 million acres. And so, on each one of those, we’re trying to understand what’s the measurable impact on carbon that goes out of the atmosphere into the soil. That’s a secret of agriculture that’s so exciting. It’s a win-win world when it comes to climate. What’s the impact on the watershed health of what’s happening on that farm? What’s the measurable improvement on biodiversity? These are some of those things that we measure to try to say regenerative means those are going in the right direction. Where it’s not a do-no-harm, it is real measurable improvements across those metrics.

John: When you bring your regenerative farming suggestions, because on its outset, from a layperson like me looking in, it’s like, “Oh, this is a no-brainer.” This is a win-win for not only PepsiCo and PepsiCo Positive, but of course for their wonderful farmers that serve their products, but also serve other communities as well, as others who also learn about all these great practices that you then get to democratize, let’s say, among the folks that you get to touch on a domino effect approach. Is it as simple as explaining to them that this is a win-win, not only for PepsiCo Positive, not only for the farmer, but the greater planet at large? Or how tough is the education and the salesmanship hurdle that you have to go through in this process?

Margaret: Well, I think one important point is we’re never going to be telling farmers how to farm. We know really well how to put those delicious products on your desk, but we are learning at least as much from farmers as they are from us, or as we are helping them learn from each [inaudible].

John: Fair enough.

Margaret: Because it starts with trust. When I was growing up, if somebody from a city came to our farm to say, “Oh, I have the new, latest, and greatest that’s going to work for you,” that was never going to fly. Now, if our neighbor came over and said, “Hey, look, I just did this thing, and look what’s happening, come and poke and prod and give it your own test,” then we were interested. So PepsiCo works on a similar approach. It always starts with trust. So when we’re engaging in a farming community, we’re usually doing it by working with a trusted partner, some kind of trusted advisor who comes from their local community, talks the same language they do, actually the same language, as well as the same cultural fluency. It always starts with a conversation about challenges and risks. These farmers usually have one chance a year to turn a profit. If they try some new, shiny thing somebody told them and it doesn’t work, that’s their entire year’s profit. How many things do you do professionally? Does any one of them completely tank your career? That’s the way a farmer has to look at it. So a farmer might get 40 chances, 40 seasons in their life. So they’re not going to try to screw up one of those seasons and mess it up. So because of this, a lot of the farmers are making changes on a small part of the field and trying to see if it works. They need the right support to make it work well. We think of it like a three-legged stool. If you take away one of those legs of the stool, it’s going to fall right over. So, those three legs are economic support. Farmers are business people. It’s possible that the average profitability of an Illinois corn farm this year is negative $30000. These are businesses. Every single farmer is a small business person. And so, economic support—one leg of that stool. Through a transition to regenerative agriculture, it should be more profitable in the long run if you’re doing it right. But it can take an upfront investment and a couple of years to see the return. So, PepsiCo has something called our Positive Ag Outcomes Accelerator, third year. We’re trying to catalyze more than $30 million in investments to sort of help test some of those new ideas, help do farmer trials and field trials, to put some of that money where our mouth is in terms of trying to help those farmers understand what’s possible. We announced $216 million of support, just in North America, for some of these trusted advisors that can be money that helps to de-risk trying this out for the farmers. The second leg of that stool—cultural support. I talked a little bit about the farmer going to church and you got the dirty fields. People laugh, and it’s not quite as fun to put in your academic articles, but it matters at least as much to have people you trust telling you that this is okay. To have people who you respect in your community saying, “I tried this, I see viability here.” That’s why the folks that we work with tend to be local, and we love to be supporting those local community actors. The third leg of the stool is, of course, agronomic support. So, if you don’t do it right from the technical perspective and you don’t plant it at the right time or harvest it at the right time, that’s one of your 40 years gone under. We’re really supporting some of that agronomy support. Our program in Australia—because I’ve been talking a lot about Illinois—let’s jump over to another geography. In Australia, we’re partnering with a group called the Cool Soils Initiative, and it provides a lot of great agronomy on-the-ground support for wheat growers, canola growers, corn growers, all through the east of Australia, oats in the west of Australia. They’re doing those on-farm trials with great agronomy, helping to share the results of what’s working and what’s not in a very dynamic environment. You think growing anything in the United States is hard? Australia? Talk about water challenges. Those farmers are amazing.

John: Well, so right now you cover about 1.8 million acres. What’s your goal with regards to PepsiCo Positive in terms of how large can this program of regenerative agriculture become and how many acres can you help affect and influence as the years keep going and evolving here in front of us?

Margaret: Well, I’ll have two answers to that. The PepsiCo commitment is that we are striving to help spread regenerative agricultural practice uptake on over 7 million acres. So, pretty good progress in 2 years to get to 1.8 million acres.

John: Wow, very good.

Margaret: We’re really proud of that and the thousands of farmers that we have partnered with and partnered with groups who partner with them on this transition. But the bigger answer is we can’t do this alone. If PepsiCo is successful, is the whole farming community successful? 7 million is a drop in the bucket of global farming acres, no matter how big we are. And so we’re trying to foster strategic partnerships that don’t just drive regenerative acres for us, but that are positive outcomes for the whole food system. We’re working with industry peers, some of our competitors, just like the Closed Loop Fund. We’re working with agricultural partners in our supply chain. This takes a system. Some of those examples that we’ve actually put in place are: we’re working with Walmart across 2 million acres. We’re going to partner with them to try to make this change. And then they’re talking about this with all their other suppliers. That starts to create a ball rolling down the hill as opposed to us pushing it up the hill.

John: That’s what Jim Collins calls ‘The Flywheel Effect.’

Margaret: Exactly. And so, doing that in agriculture is just the same. The U.S. government released a climate-smart commodities program where the U.S. government was putting money into this work. We partnered with that. We put some match funding in to try to scale this further. Let’s share learnings. What’s working? What’s not? Get those farmer research results to be widely accessible to create that flywheel of change. And so [crosstalk].

John: What’s your goal with 7 million acres? How long do you want to take? It took you 2 years to get to 1.8. That’s nothing. That’s amazing. How long will it take you to go from 1.8? The first steps and getting the inertia already broken is always the hardest part. How long will it take you to get to 7, do you think?

Margaret: Well, I’m going to give the same answer that any given farmer that you go and ask about their yields. You go to Brazil and you ask a corn farmer, “What do you think your yields are going to be this year?” They’re going to give you the answer they’re committed to. But who’s not trying to go further? So, PepsiCo is committed to try to spread regenerative practices over 7 million acres. But, by golly, the kinds of things we’re seeing and the kinds of phenomenal resilience in these communities, we’re sure hoping that there’s a whole lot more change than that that’s created in the world. We’re trying to do it by 2030.

John: You can put the farmer woman in PepsiCo, but you can’t take the farmer woman out of the farm that she grew up in. That’s for sure.

Margaret: We’re talking agriculture. It’s something everybody eats. Who doesn’t want to know a little bit more about where it comes from?

John: Darn straight. Now, more than ever. My kids’ generation, they’re feeding their families, and they’re more into it than I’ve ever seen anybody. For our listeners and viewers that just joined us today, we’ve got Margaret Henry with us. She’s the Vice President of Sustainable and Regenerative Agriculture at PepsiCo. To find Margaret and all of her colleagues that are making the world a better place in sustainability and regenerative agriculture at PepsiCo, go to www.pepsico.com. Margaret, talk a little bit about you’re there 8 years, you’re getting a lot of traction in what you’re doing with PepsiCo Positive. Talk about some of the wins or projects that you’re the most excited or proud of right now.

Margaret: Sure. I think our Positive Ag Outcomes Accelerator is one I’m really excited about. It’s where we help to support projects on the ground where farmers have a cool idea and they think it’s going to work. But there’s a little risk involved. And like I said, if you’re a farmer and you’ve got 40 seasons to either make it or break it, and any given one of them, the farm goes under, your kids say, “Where’s my farm, Dad? Where’s my farm, Mom? What’d you do to it?” So, being able to de-risk innovation and let them try something in this dynamic environment with climate change coming out of every other day, that’s really important. So, that’s one I’m really proud of, and that’s all over the world. We’ve got so many cool, interesting innovations that we’re supporting. You can go to PepsiCo.com to learn a little bit more about it. If I could, tell you a little story that brings it to life. Not every one of your listeners is a farmer. They’re not out in the fields. So, one of the things that’s often talked about in regenerative agriculture is cover crops. Imagine that you’re growing something. Usually, you plant it in the spring and you harvest it in the fall. That’s when things usually grow. When it’s warm, that’s when we’re all outside enjoying the great outdoors. Here in North America, it’s starting to be a little chillier. We’re coming inside. Many of the farmers are harvesting those crops. So, what do you do to all of your land? Your land is your primary asset as a farmer, right? That’s where everything comes from. A lot of land is bare. If you think about just a bare dirt field, what happens when it rains? All that dirt starts to flow off your field. What happens in a windstorm? All that dirt starts to be what you see all across the north of this country sometimes in the winter: black snow because the soil has blown off those fields. You’re losing your primary asset. So, cover crops is saying plant something in the fall. Something with roots that will keep living roots in the ground all year round. And so, then you can plant it in the fall. You kill it in the spring before you plant your next crop. That’s your major crop. And you hold on to your soil. But there’s other benefits too. You plant something and it has a root that goes down in that soil. Having that root instead of just a hard soil that sort of sinks and gets solidified like cement all winter, now you have a root. And so, when it has a rainstorm where you’re getting five inches of rain in a day, which is almost unheard of, it’s just crazy. This is what produces these crazy floods for cities. If you’re a farmer, you could lose all your soil. But if you’ve had that cover crop, then that water can go right through where that root was. That root has decayed, but it’s left that nice channel. So, in the flood, that field is not going to be a mud pit, which also means you can actually get in earlier to plant. A lot of your profitability has to do with how long your crop can grow in the field. If you get in there early because it’s drained instead of just becoming a pond, that’s good for your bottom line. Now, what if there’s a drought? Well, those plants, it’s not just the major root, they also have little capillary roots. So, tiny little channels that go kind of sideways in the soil, can actually hold a little bit of water. So, when there’s a drought, that field has more water in it. So, these cover crops provide a lot of benefits. That’s just one of these practices that is what’s really happening when we talk about these fancy words of regenerative agriculture. Another fancy fact: that root was taking carbon out of the atmosphere and sticking it into the soil. That’s good for everybody.

John: It’s good for everybody. I want to go back to that issue of carbon capture and net zero goals in a second, but let’s go back to something you were talking about. I don’t want to give short shrift or glance over what you talked about in terms of collaboration. Most of us have grown up with the iconic guys, whether they be Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, of course, Elon Musk, but I don’t want to just say “guys.” Sarah Blakely, Martha Stewart, Beyoncé—that have made themselves self-made billionaires as iconic one-person brands almost. That’s great, and it’s fun because it drives more innovation and entrepreneurship. But truthfully, real business now is being done the way you just laid out about 5 minutes ago in terms of collaboration with diverse partners who are experts in their expertise and bringing them all together to create more impactful and important outcomes. Talk a little bit about your theory on collaboration and partnerships and why people should be leaning into that instead of just saying, “I got this, I’m going to do it by myself.” Talk a little bit about speed, efficiency, and impact when it comes to collaborations and partnerships.

Margaret: Partnerships are critical. The food system is a system, and so, you’ve got a whole lot of actors. Anybody who’s growing or producing or making food, interact with banks, they interact with their local community, that water goes down to a city and it becomes your drinking water. So, shouldn’t that municipality care about that drinking water quality? Shouldn’t the school system care about having kids who live in that rural community who are going to go to school? Food is a system. And so, we think it’s really important to partner across that system. Farmers grow five or six different crops on their land often and they’ll rotate them around. PepsiCo is not buying every single one of them. So, PepsiCo is often partnering with diverse partners to try to say, “Well, what are all the things a farmer is growing? How is there a way to make sure that that farmer is getting the right signal across the rotation of their crops? Who else cares about these environmental outcomes? Who else cares about the health of these rural communities? We should be working together.” The food system’s health is in absolutely everybody’s interest and there are a tremendous number of win-wins here. So, what we’re doing in North Dakota is a good example. I don’t know if you want a quick example of it.

John: Sure.

Margaret: We’re working with a bunch of different companies in North Dakota to support independent crop advisors. We said, “You could try to reach farmer by farmer or you could realize that a handful of independent crop consultants can reach a million acres, and they’re the trusted advisors to those farmers already.” So, give them the right agronomy, give them the right financial support to help meet them where they are in their transition. We’re doing that with multiple companies. We’ve got a $20 million grant that’s related to the U.S. government that’s trying to support the sort of outcomes that we’re trying to support also in that community. We’re working with the Walmart Foundation on that because this is in their interest too. Trying to understand who are all the players. We’re also working with banks. We think at PepsiCo that PepsiCo Positive is how we really embed sustainability in who we are as a business because we want to be around in 100 years. Well, banks should be paying attention to the resilience of these farms as well. So, we’re working with a bank to offer a lower interest rate for farmers who are doing regenerative agriculture because when there’s a drought and a flood and their soil runs off the field, they’re the ones with the green corn.

John: Margaret, even though you have very young looks, 17 years makes you a sustainability OG. With 17 years under your belt, let’s talk a little bit about some of the biggest trends or things that we’re hearing about every day when we turn on Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox, or any of the networks or pick up the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Talk a little bit about AI. Is that the end-all, be-all, cure-all for our sustainability problems? Too soon to know? What’s your feeling as net positive, net benefit, net negative, or benign? Where is AI going to play a role to help us get to our greater goals in terms of regenerative agriculture, net zero, decarbonizing, and cooling down this planet?

Margaret: Well, first, I can’t help but be the farmer on the podcast here. I was at a conference yesterday with a whole bunch of farmers and ranchers, and we were talking about Gen AI. These ranchers, they’ve got cows, they said, “One of you corporate types came to my farm and you were talking all about AI. We’ve got AI. We’ve had it for decades, man.” I handed them the AI gun, and they didn’t know what to do with it. AI also means artificial insemination. That was my joke for you, but I know you’re talking about Gen AI. I’ll just say it takes every tool in the toolbox for agriculture. We have demonstration farms in Latin America alone. We’ve tested 200 different innovative technologies in the last year. How do we understand which ones work? How do we understand where they have a role? Same question for AI. It’s got to be a tool in the toolbox. I think if you define the problem you’re trying to solve and where AI can be a solution to it, that’s where you start with the exploration. It’s a great tool in the toolbox. Let’s see where it’s applicable and what problems it can solve.

John: As you and I know, climate change is real. The science has been in for a long time, and it’s probably accelerating even faster than Vice President Gore said it would ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in terms of the changes that are happening. How much does that make your job even more challenging to harmonize the best practices and procedures with regards to regenerative agriculture, but also understanding that climate change is affecting all the countries around the world that you get to sell your great PepsiCo products in, but also where you derive the products that go into the PepsiCo products. How difficult is the climate change challenge and how much does it keep you up at night?

Margaret: Well, I’d say it keeps me up at night about as much as it keeps farmers up at night because we rely on those raw materials for every single one of the ingredients that we put in your pantry every day. If you’re enjoying some Smartfood popcorn, if you’re enjoying some Doritos or a PepsiCo Cola, man, you better care about the production of those ingredients. And it’s getting harder. Whatever you want to call it, it’s getting harder out there. I also go back to growing up on a dairy farm. None of these words were out there: sustainable, resilient, regenerative.

John: That’s right.

Margaret: But did we want clean water? Did we want strong, healthy soil? Did we want a farm that was economically viable we wanted to pass down to the next generation? Well, that’s actually what we mean by sustainable and regenerative agriculture—being resilient to all the shocks that come their way. Are they financial? Are they environmental? Are they social? Resilience means we’re trying to help, and we’re aspiring to support farmers to have resilient farms. And so, climate change is just another one of those real big challenges coming their way. Farms have dealt with floods and droughts and heatwaves and everything forever. Now, they’re a lot more frequent. And so, the heart of what PepsiCo is trying to do with our regenerative agriculture work is make farms more resilient or be partners with them in helping them to take the journey they want to take in becoming more resilient. There’s lots of different ways to do it. It’s different on every farm. But that’s the heart of it: yes, climate change is a really big challenge for these farmers, and regenerative agriculture is a great pathway to resilience.

John: Margaret, all the great wins that you’re racking up in regenerative agriculture and sustainability, they’re up in an annual report every year on the pepsico.com website, or where can people find all the great stuff that’s going on with regards to regenerative agriculture and sustainability at PepsiCo?

Margaret: Absolutely. Try out pepsico.com. There’s a lot of information there. There’s some stories about some of the fantastic things that are going on. We’ve got all kinds of good wins under our belt, but we’ve got a lot to learn and a lot of partners. It’s going to take everybody in the entire food system, which means if any one of you eats, every single one of you to make this transition a success.

John: Talk a little bit about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a very important business tool. I use it a lot. Talk about your LinkedIn newsletter, ‘Path to Positive’. When did that launch, and how is that doing? And what are you messaging in that great name, ‘Path to Positive’, in terms of your newsletter there?

Margaret: Absolutely. LinkedIn is increasingly a really neat place to find what people are thinking and how this progress is being made. My boss, who’s one of the smartest people in the sustainability world I know, Jim Andrew, he’s launched a newsletter. It’s a quarterly newsletter. It’s on LinkedIn. You can go and find it there. It’s called ‘Path to Positive’. It gives a little update about what we’re doing here at PepsiCo, what we’re learning, how we’re striving to impact the planet and the people. I think reading a lot from people who know what they’re doing in this space, if you’re looking at this as a career, if you’re looking to learn, if you eat food, it might be interesting to you. Jim Andrew, ‘Path to Positive’, that’s our quarterly update on what we’re doing here at PepsiCo across everything, not just agriculture. I know I’ve talked to you all a lot about farming today, but across everything that we’re doing in the PepsiCo universe, which is really just so many interesting things. Check it out.

John: Yeah. We’re going to put that in the show notes, as we will also, of course, pepsico.com and any of the great stories or wins you want to include in the show notes. Margaret, we’re going to put that in there for easy access for our listeners, viewers, and readers. You’ve been doing this 17 years. If I had money to bet at the tables in Las Vegas, you’re going to be doing this another 17 years in terms of corporate sustainability. The fun part is I get to have startup brands on this show that have great aspirations of making the world a better place, but then I also get to have amazing and huge iconic brands like PepsiCo. What I’ve learned over the last 18 years of doing this show or almost 18 years, is that when the iconic brands make a move in sustainability, it really moves the needle. Talk a little bit about what you’re most excited about in the coming years with regards to corporate sustainability and huge iconic multinational brands like PepsiCo and the interrelationship and the impact that those brands can make to make the world a better place.

Margaret: And what’s the interrelationship with all of those really cool startups?

John: True.

Margaret: Well, I think my aspiration and my hope is that more folks are seeing it the way we are, that their sustainability journey is their end-to-end business transformation journey. The more sustainability is about the way businesses transform, the way businesses inspire, the way businesses collaborate, the more positive change we can have. You talked a little bit earlier and you asked some questions about partnership, but no one actor in the system can do it alone. We need each other for the good ideas. We need those startups. We need those bright young minds with new ideas and new solutions to the challenges that we’re facing. We need the big brands to be working together to move at scale in mass towards the right solutions. We need government to be partnering. We need the financial sector to be partnering. Food’s a really easy one because we all care about eating food. We all want to eat it in the future. We all want it to be good food. And so, thinking about the food system is one where collaboration is really key. That’s the future trend that I’m excited about—collaboration for resilience. If what we care about, which certainly for PepsiCo it is, is thriving communities and thriving ecosystems, that takes a village. It takes literally the entire village. Everyone who cares about the water that flows through the village, the air that comes out of that village, it takes everybody. I think collaboration at that landscape level, that’s what is the future. That’s what I’m most excited about in the food system.

John: That’s so awesome, Margaret. For our listeners and viewers to find Margaret Henry and all our colleagues at pepsico.com that are making the world a better place and working in regenerative agriculture or just in sustainability, please go to www.pepsico.com. Margaret Henry, thank you for spending about an hour with us today to share your vision, PepsiCo’s vision for PepsiCo Positive, and all the great things you’re doing in regenerative agriculture and sustainability. Most important, thank you for all the great work you and your colleagues are doing to make the world a better place. We’re all so very grateful.

Margaret: Thank you, John, and thank you all for listening. It’s going to take all of us in this change. I really appreciate you joining us just for a little while, John and I, while we talked about agriculture. I hope you learned a little something, and I hope you take it forward in your daily lives. Thank you, John.

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