Investment of 100 million dollars inaugurated by PepsiCo Romania

Yesterday, PepsiCo inaugurated the automated warehouse at the snack factory in Popeşti-Leordeni, an investment that amounts to over 100 million dollars. Following the implementation of the project started in 2022, three operational production lines were added to the snack factory and the automated warehouse was built. The investment in the state-of-the-art automated warehouse was $33.5 million and construction took one year. The construction took place on an area of 32,500 square meters, with a 34-meter-high high bay warehouse in the center. The total warehouse capacity is 23,500 pallets and the total processing capacity is 320 pallets per hour. The warehouse is designed to be energy self-sufficient, powered by a 6,000 square meter photovoltaic panel system with an installed capacity of 700 kWp. It provides more efficient inventory control and guarantees pallet integrity by reducing handling points.

The investment in the new automated warehouse is part of PepsiCo's efforts to achieve the long-term goals of the pep+ agenda and will contribute to a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of almost 500 tonnes in total. Over the course of a year, the warehouse will help eliminate more than 9,000 transfer trucks and reduce the carbon footprint of a stored pallet by five times.

The PepsiCo snacks factory currently has an annual production capacity of 39,000 tons and serves 17 countries: Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Ukraine, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Czech Republic and Slovakia.

At the inauguration of the warehouse, Radu Berevoescu, General Manager & Senior Commercial Director East Balkans PepsiCo Romania, said: "The completion of this investment represents an important step in the centralization of all our operations in a single point, transforming our factory into a strategic regional center for Central and South-Eastern Europe. Benefiting from impressive production and storage capacity, it will ensure efficient inventory control while reducing carbon emissions and operational costs."

He mentioned that 95% of the snack factory's production is provided by potatoes and corn produced in Romania, PepsiCo having a permanent collaboration with 27 farmers from our country, with half of them working for almost 20 years.

Present at the event, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu stated that Pepsi, although it is an American company, has "permanently preserved a sequence of Romanian DNA" and that "it is the model of the caliber investor in the Romanian economy".

The Head of Government specified: "Pepsi is a company that exports production from here to 17 other countries in the world. For all this, I can only assure you of my appreciation and respect. Of course, no matter how much I praise you, you certainly won't forget, and you haven't forgotten, the fact that the Government I lead, with the current Minister of Finance, we are the ones who taxed products that have a high sugar content. I am well aware of this! Although I think I will give the Minister of Finance grief, I ask you to focus on drinks with less sugar. And obviously to chips with less salt. I am convinced that such products will find buyers in the future, because Romanian consumers are becoming more and more attentive to the impact of these products on their health. And since we're talking about the future, even if you want to publicly or privately, I'd like you to tell me the secret to last year's over 2,000 percent increase in profits. If there were 10 other big investors with such a profit, for sure, and I tell you that I did the calculations, my state budget would be in surplus, not in deficit!".

For her part, the US ambassador to Bucharest, Kathleen Kavalec, said the new warehouse is a proof of innovation, includes advanced robotics technique and has a part of sustainability that will achieve carbon neutrality by 2040. (... ) In the last 10 years, PepsiCo's investments in Romania exceeded 320 million dollars, which shows that the market in this country remains a priority for American investors".