PepsiCo

Here to elaborate on this profound digitalisation journey is Kamil Chudziński, Head of Transformation at PepsiCo Poland.

“I joined the company in February 2023, when PepsiCo Poland had a clear vision for putting digital strategy at the forefront of its transformation journey,” says Kamil. “This was a moment when PepsiCo Poland had just finished implementing the new version of SAP. During this three-year process, the evolution of our systems had to take a back seat. Then, in 2023 when this project completed, we entered a diagnosis phase. We considered where we were, what our priority areas to tackle would be and how we could realise our ambitions.

“Towards the end of 2023, we had a crystallised strategy on the key dimensions of our digital transformation. What is absolutely crucial to understand here is we made it an essential part of our general company transformation journey. This helped us to get support from the entire Leadership Team. Continuing on our digitalisation path, today we have four building blocks of our digitalisation strategies, which we put as an absolute priority. Each one has multiple elements to it.

1) Cashless

“The first component of our digital strategies is cashless. Here at PepsiCo in Poland, we work directly with around 65,000 retailers in the Hotel, Restaurant, and Café/Catering (HoReCa) industry alongside traditional trade avenues. So we have a huge base of customers that we work with. Before we started to engage our cashless mission, we had over 30% of our revenue generated in these two channels from cash.

“The problem with cash is twofold. First of all, it’s very expensive, because for us to pay our suppliers or for us to pay our employees, we need to digitise this money – which is a costly obligation.

“Second, and even more importantly, cash reconciliation is a big time-consuming element. Every time our sales representatives or drivers collected cash, they needed to spend approximately 25 minutes to do the cash reconciliation properly. It didn’t matter if the transaction was $1,000 or $1. The smallest amount still takes the same amount of time to complete the transaction.

“So this became a clear priority for us to work towards withdrawing cash transactions from our operating model as soon as possible.

“The progress we have made today is great, we already reduced cash by over 60%. In April 2025, we had slightly above 12% of revenue generated from cash. And this is still before the most significant digitalisation project yet to come. The mobile payment solution we are about to launch will be the first solution in Poland with fully flexible payment capabilities for our drivers and sales representatives.

2) Paperless

“The second building block in our digitalisation journey was setting ourselves up to become paperless. The paperless programme is a part of a wider agenda for the company. PepsiCo is very much dedicated towards the environment and making our operations as eco-friendly as possible.

“We conduct 6,5000 deliveries every day, so we generate a massive amount of paper. Here in Poland, we have legislation coming in February 2026 – the KSeF E-Invoicing Mandate, which means every invoice from PepsiCo to our business partners will be done through the government digital platform.

“As such we had two motivators to become paperless in our operations. First, there was the pending legislation from the Polish government. Second, PepsiCo’s own ambitious sustainability agenda, which means we want to go deeper and eliminate paper entirely from our operations.

“So far, we have reduced our paper consumption, equivalent to around 870 trees. This is a key area where we are trying to have an impact on the environment.

“However once our solution is well grounded, we will do our best to encourage other peer companies to join us. It is mind-blowing that in the FMCG industry, we waste from 15,000 to 20,000 trees every year just to cover paper for deliveries realisation. We aim to grasp as much value from this situation as possible by encouraging and supporting other businesses to join our initiative.

3) One platform

“The third dynamic of our digital strategy is something we call the customer digital workspace. This is an idea and a strategy where we want to have one platform for all our business partners.

“We are starting with the retailers in HoReCa and traditional trade. We are building them a platform which will help us to holistically make doing business with us easier. The customer digital workspace is effectively a collaboration hub with four elements to it.

“First, we have designed the platform to be the most convenient way to place an order. Second, it is a comprehensive customer service hub. Third, it serves as a finance management portal. Lastly, it is a centralised information resource.

“We went live with the customer digital workspace in November 2024. It has been tremendously successful and it is fundamentally important to PepsiCo Poland because it integrates, encompasses and represents all components of our broader digital strategies.

“Our launch of this global platform is the best so far. Already over 60% of all orders in HoReCa channel are generated through the PepHub platform.

4) Independence

“The fourth and final building block of our digital strategy is self-service and field automation. Here, what we are towards is the concept that whatever a retailer can do themselves, it is usually more convenient for them to do it that way. We want retailers to be able to complete every operation they might need to do independently, making self-service as smoothly as possible.

“In terms of field automation, to help our field force work more efficiently and effectively. We began working on this dynamic back in 2023 during the diagnosis and design phase of our digital transformation journey. By the end of that year, when we launched the initiation phase, we knew 2024 would entail work on our digital landscape. The first big project was our customer collaboration platform called PepHub – launched in November 2024.

“When I joined PepsiCo Poland two years ago, I was very impressed by how ambitious the company is in terms of our digital transformation, growth, customer collaboration and vision. The overarching goal is to be the most digitalised company in the fast-moving consumer goods industry (FMCG) in Poland by 2027 – and I believe our road map will help us realise this ambition.”

However, to fully understand the digital transformation journey at PepsiCo Poland, it must be contextualised alongside one of the company’s core priorities – operational excellence. Kamil divides this down into three components: holistic change management, test & learn, and a balanced approach to innovation.

“We have to ensure that our programmes and operations not only work, but drive a positive impact on our revenues,” says Kamil. “Therefore, we approach operational excellence not only from a technology perspective, but in a much more comprehensive way.

“As part of this, we have developed a holistic approach to change management involving people, processes and technology. In terms of people within the scope of operational excellence, we ensure that everyone knows what they should do. With processes, we redesign them comprehensively – moving beyond the mindset of plug and play. For technology, we approach it as a unifying enabler for people and processes, driving operational excellence.”

Beyond this holistic approach to change management, Kamil emphasises that testing and learning are crucial to operational excellence at PepsiCo Poland.

“Whatever idea we have, we will test it before launching it,” says Kamil. “Testing is not in our DNA as a company, however in Poland with our digital transformation team, we are building this openness to test and learn, with failing being a big part of this. For instance, when we created our Innovation Division, we took 5% of the entire field sales team in Poland and redesigned their mission. The Innovation Division is designed to be accountable for testing our ideas, programmes and operational efficiency projects – before we launch them nationwide.

“Our Innovation division is absolutely key to driving our transformation. All programmes which are now in the preparation or execution phase were first tested in the Innovation Division. Some of them had a very rough start. For example, our paperless operations initiative was, in the first month, negatively impacting our revenue by almost 8%. We had to learn how to adapt. It took us three months to correct all mistakes and make sure we are ready to launch it nationwide. We did this on May 12, 2025 with no negative impact on the revenue.”

Lastly, Kamil describes the balance needed when deploying innovation in the realm of operational excellence. And here, agility is fundamental.

“Agility defines innovation as an enabler of operational excellence here at PepsiCo Poland,” says Kamil. “We want to move quickly, testing our ideas and concepts with the lowest possible cost and efficient turnaround times, and the Innovation Division is crucial to this end.

“For instance, consider merchandising our products. We had an idea for how to do this digitally using just WhatsApp. The cost of the test was zero, it took a week to set up, and within a month, we had clear insights as to whether the project had potential.

“Instead of wasting weeks and months to set up experiments, we embrace creativity and agility – drawing our inspiration from startup management thinking, driven by testing, feedback and pivoting. We quickly gauge if our operational excellence projects work, and if they do, whether they are scalable.”

But how has PepsiCo Poland maintained the momentum behind its digital transformation journey? According to Kamil, continued success depends on deploying strategic approaches that not only secure top-level approval, but grassroots buy-in.

“Based on my experience, not only in PepsiCo, but also previously, I think there are two elements which can break on or make digital transformation work,” shares Kamil. “First is the engagement from the Leadership Team of the organisation. Fortunately, here in Poland, we have a General Manager who fully believes in the digital transformation and supports it, and this positivity manifests with all our senior leaders. This upbeat attitude towards digital transformation helps us to make it a priority which is thoroughly understood and accepted by the entire leadership team.

“But there is a crucial second element as well: our digital transformation’s success hinges on creating a programme designed to benefit the people who will ultimately be impacted by it.

“If a digital transformation project is underway for the sales team, the field force, or any other department, they must be intrinsically involved in the process and buy into it as well. We must talk to these colleagues, bring them into the journey early at the diagnosis phase, and consult with them along the way.

“Thanks to the Innovation Division, which reports directly to me, we have a group of people who serve as a point of contact and can immediately relay to us broader company feedback about what they need and how certain things could be improved.

“This vertical support from the very top of the organisation to the teams working under them has been imperative to the success of our digital transformation journey.”

As PepsiCo continues on its journey of digitalisation, Kamil stresses the importance of partnerships and collaboration in propelling the company forward and driving business goals.

“As a company, we are currently looking to develop our existing foundation of global partnerships,” says Kamil.  “We are looking at these collaborations from the perspective of efficiencies and scalability, and we already work with some of the best systems such as SAP and Salesforce.

“But as the Polish arm of PepsiCo, we are also looking to reconcile some of the gaps between these large global platforms and our location-specific needs.

“Fortunately, I’m pleased to say, PepsiCo is allowing us to enhance our journey with specific partners to assist us here.

“One of the great examples here is our partnership with Asseco Platform, part of the Asseco Group. Access to data is an area of increasing importance for PepsiCo Poland.

“The FMCG market is full of data. Retailers, wholesalers and customers all offer a vast pool of valuable data – but without access to it, companies in the industry are at a disadvantage.

“We have the category expertise but these entities hold the data – if we can combine the two, I strongly believe the opportunity for growth is exponential, for both us and our clients.

“To bring these two dynamics together, one of the projects we recently launched was our so-called Connector Platform. When selecting a partner to drive this capability, we were looking for a company that would be open to supporting us – not only in the technical expertise, but also open and able to support and challenge us from a business perspective.

“Here, Asseco Platform is helping us to grow. We started by building a holistic database of information from the entire wholesale environment in Poland.

“This is an extraordinary project because we are gaining visibility for PepsiCo across all of our 65,000 outlets. So far, we have seen a significant increase in our access to information, which enables us to be much more precise in our activities.

“The wholesale aspect of the project has been so successful, we are now entering a second phase where we are in conversation with Asseco about how we can dive even deeper into the data from our key accounts and direct retailers.

“We are looking forward to exploring more data-led opportunities with Asseco as a valued partner supporting us – to better understand the market, define our targets and secure value from this information.

“We are truly challenging ourselves to drive innovation not only in technology but even more in how we can use it. Here we want to be the best.”

Looking ahead to the coming years, Kamil is excited for the future at PepsiCo Poland, and how it can contribute to the broader organisation.

“Today, I am more certain than ever that by 2027, we will be the most digitalised FMCG company in Poland,” insists Kamil. “I say this with confidence because we have a range of programmes in place that are ready to launch, where we have already gone through the pain periods all companies face when embarking on digital transformation.

“It is an exhilarating stage where we are setting up and perfecting the launch plans with a holistic agenda before us.

“In particular, I’m extremely proud of how PepsiCo is willing to continue investing in the environmental initiatives we have worked so hard to make successful here in Poland.

“From the very beginning, our paperless project had a lot of risks, and still, PepsiCo has decided to invest in the solution and run it on a smaller scale with us in Poland, being patient enough to make sure it works.

“My dream is that the entire FMCG industry follows our lead. In Poland alone, the FMCG industry could save around 15,000 trees every year from being chopped down if it replicated our paperless journey.

“I work with very ambitious targets, but fortunately, I have the pleasure of working at an ambitious company alongside a very strong team that is dedicated to delivering impactful and intentional digital transformation to meet these goals.

“I want to stress that the success of our digital transformation directly arises from the amazing team I get to work with at PepsiCo Poland. We have a team consisting of talented people from a diverse range of backgrounds, from sales representatives to project managers. This composition allows us to approach programmes holistically and innovatively, and it is a pleasure to be part of this wonderful team.”

For more insights into the digital transformation at PepsiCo Poland, visit pepsicopoland.com.

ADDED VALUE

Institutional support

Kamil emphasises his gratitude to PepsiCo for being open to ideas, giving him the space to test concepts, which he finds invigorating.

“When I joined PepsiCo Poland, I had never personally had such a rich opportunity to work somewhere so open to my ideas and initiative,” says Kamil. “It is a rare phenomenon to have full company support when trying new things, with the space to test and prove your concepts – this gives me a lot of energy.”

People with purpose

“PepsiCo is a company built around people, and I take a lot of positive energy from being challenged by others,” says Kamil. “I thrive on questions. How does it work? Will it work? How can we make it work even better? Facing queries like this takes us a step beyond our comfort zones. With my team this is not done from a place of rejection or hesitation. Instead, it is done with understanding, shared ambitions and a continuous improvement mindset.

“In particular, my immediate team of four are amazing in this regard. I am incredibly grateful to Magdalena Połowniak, Adam Wojtkowski, Łukasz Pawłowski and Waldemar Zagórski for helping me create and drive our entire digital transformation strategy.”

Outside perspective

“I try to attend and speak at as many conferences as I can,” shares Kamil. “Attending these events gives me external perspective and inspiration. Two conferences I always look forward to attending are Opex Week and the Digital Food & Beverage conferences – they are super inspirational.”

Recommended reading

“I am a reader, so I try to read many books and extract value from them,” says Kamil. “There are two inspirational books which I read recently, which I would highly recommend.

“One was Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari. I have read all of his books, but this one is amazing because it gives a bit of a different perspective on what information actually is, and how to manage it – which is particularly insightful if you work in digital transformation.

“The second one is They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan. This is all about inbound marketing and answering what customers really want to know. It helped me become more consumer- and customer-centric.”

Connect with Kamil.