PepsiCo: From "Small Family" to "Big Family," Building a Warm and Healthy Workplace Ecosystem

Ask AI · Why can an elastic benefits system achieve a 90% participation rate?

**Byline **| Peng Haiyan

In today’s environment, where external conditions are becoming increasingly complex and technological change continues to reshape work patterns, workplace uncertainty and the growing prominence of diverse needs across generations are pushing companies to elevate employee health management and benefits systems to a strategic level. Employee health has gone beyond the individual’s scope and become a key factor in sustaining organizational vitality and enabling sustainable development.

As a leading company in the fast-moving consumer goods industry, PepsiCo upholds the “people-first” philosophy as its core principle. It has built an all-employee elastic benefits system called “Pepsi Family Portrait (PEP Care),” which deeply integrates health strategy, social responsibility, and an inclusive culture. This not only turns benefits into an employee’s “backstop support,” but also into an important link for conveying corporate culture and connecting individuals to society.

When asked in an interview with China-CEIBS Business Review, Xu Yi, PepsiCo’s Regional Compensation Director for Asia Pacific and Greater China, said: PepsiCo uses the “100% protection, 100% care, and 100% responsibility” approach as the foundation to build a comprehensive, warm health workplace ecosystem for employees—so that this warmth from the company’s “small home” extends to society’s “big home,” achieving win-win coexistence among the company, employees, and society.

Xu Yi

Regional Compensation Director for Asia Pacific and Greater China at PepsiCo

Percentage protection:

Building a comprehensive and “heartfelt” benefits innovation system

“Employee benefits are an important component of total compensation. Compensation provides incentives; benefits are not only a backstop protection, but also an important medium for conveying company culture.” In Xu Yi’s view, as employees born in the 1990s and 2000s become the main workforce in the workplace, employee needs are becoming increasingly individualized. How to build a benefits system that covers all employees and responds to different demands has become a core challenge facing businesses.

In the fast-moving consumer goods industry, traditional benefits systems are often fragmented, and the design typically targets office white-collar workers, making it difficult to systematically cover large groups such as frontline workers and sales teams. To break through this industry bottleneck, in 2024 PepsiCo officially launched the “Pepsi Family Portrait (PEP Care)” elastic benefits system. Centered on employees, it builds a full-family protection network covering employees themselves, children, spouses, parents, and even pets. Through three major pillars—“100% protection, 100% happiness, and 100% responsibility”—it establishes a systematic, personalized health benefits ecosystem.

“Our benefits system is not a product developed behind closed doors. It is the result of truly listening to the voices of frontline employees, and after deeply understanding their needs, tailoring solutions for them.”

Xu Yi explained that PepsiCo has more than 6,500 employees in China. Among them, more than 60%-70% are frontline workers distributed in food factories, with an average age close to 40 and an average tenure of seven or eight years. There are also sales teams that are constantly on the move, as well as R&D and office employees who are primarily white-collar. These three groups differ significantly in lifestyle, health risks, and benefits expectations.

Therefore, in the second half of 2023, PepsiCo worked with Mercer to go deep into food factories, frontline sales, and offices, conducting two-month, 20-to-30 Focus Group interviews to cover employee groups across different roles and age brackets. “We ran one session after another—into the factories, into the frontline sales areas, into the offices. For each session, we invited 15 to 20 employees and learned what they truly need.” Xu Yi recalled.

It is precisely this “going down” style of research that has led to a series of highly targeted benefits designs filled with humanistic care. For frontline workers, it offers parental discharge escort and nursing services to address the pain point that employees working away from home cannot take care of sick parents. For the sales team, it adds accidental insurance for electric scooters to reduce accidental risks at work. For all employees, it provides offline health activities such as TCM consultations, weight-loss challenges, and health check-in programs to cover health needs across different groups.

A benefits system is not “set it and forget it.” PepsiCo has also established a continuous dynamic iteration mechanism. Xu Yi said that every year, PepsiCo updates benefits programs based on employee satisfaction surveys, claims data analysis, and market insights. For example, in 2025, it added women’s critical illness insurance and the Carrot global pregnancy-and-childbearing health care platform. At the same time, it launched the nudge financial health platform and thoughtfully added pet insurance benefits. In 2026, it introduced a benefits points public-welfare donation mechanism, extending the health benefits system into the social realm.

However, implementing such a complex system covering more than 6,500 employees is no easy task. In Xu Yi’s view, the biggest challenge is not the design of the program, but communication. To ensure that each employee—especially frontline workers—can understand and use the benefits, the team created richly illustrated operating guides and conducted hands-on training directly in the factories. Xu Yi emphasized, “The key to communication is honesty. We not only need to tell employees ‘what benefits are available,’ but also explain ‘why they were designed this way’ and ‘what value they bring.’”

It is thanks to this precise design based on deep research, the continuous iteration mechanism, and patient, detail-oriented communication that the “Pepsi Family Portrait” system has earned broad recognition from employees, achieving an average participation rate as high as 90%. It has become a benchmark for all-employee benefits coverage in the fast-moving consumer goods industry, truly making “100% protection” comprehensive and heartfelt.

Percentage happiness:

Building an inclusive health culture

“Equality and inclusion are the DNA of Pepsi’s corporate culture, and the benefits system is an important vehicle for putting this culture into practice.” Xu Yi emphasized, “Our benefits don’t do a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach; instead, we adhere to the principle of ‘full coverage, no discrimination.’ We are committed to meeting differentiated needs across different groups, so that every employee can feel respected and cared for.”

At Pepsi, whether it’s frontline workers in the factories, sales representatives, R&D personnel, or office white-collar employees, they can enjoy the same benefits rights and have equal choices.

In addition, this理念 is reflected in all-around health support for female employees. In 2025, PepsiCo launched women’s critical illness insurance. It not only covers the company’s female employees, but also includes the spouses of male employees in the coverage scope—an initiative that is quite forward-looking in the fast-moving consumer goods industry.

Meanwhile, PepsiCo also simultaneously launched the globally unified Carrot pregnancy-and-childbearing health care platform. Its service scope goes beyond traditional support for pregnancy and childbirth, extending to health management across women’s full life cycle—from preconception preparation, pregnancy and childbirth, to postpartum recovery, as well as menopause care and mental health. Employees can receive one-on-one consultation from a professional medical team.

“Female employees face dual pressure at home and at work, and their health needs are more finely segmented.” Xu Yi explained, “We hope to use the Carrot platform to provide comprehensive support for female employees, so that at every stage of life, they can feel the company’s care.”

Inclusive care goes beyond health and extends into employees’ financial and mental well-being. In 2025, PepsiCo launched the nudge wealth management platform. Through knowledge dissemination, it helps employees with retirement planning, asset allocation, and other matters, providing free financial planning services to all employees. At the same time, Pepsi plans to introduce annual mental health activities in 2026. It will also design differentiated communication and support methods for frontline employees, management, and office employees, creating a workplace atmosphere of psychological safety.

“Building an inclusive health culture cannot be done without enabling and driving from leaders.” Xu Yi stressed that during the promotion of “Pepsi Family Portrait,” managers play a crucial role—they are advocates of benefits policies and also transmitters of health culture.

At the start of the project, PepsiCo’s management team attached great importance to it. Senior executives such as the general manager and the CRO personally took part in employee briefing sessions to convey the company’s benefits philosophy. Meanwhile, managers across departments actively coordinated with the HR team, organized internal department communication sessions, answered employees’ questions, and promoted the rollout of benefits policies.

“When employees see the company’s top leadership personally show up to support benefits initiatives, their trust in the benefits and their participation levels increase significantly.” Xu Yi said proudly that it was through the systematic construction of an inclusive health culture that, in the 2025 employee satisfaction survey, results reached 95 points or above.

It is this systematic construction of “happiness” that transforms benefits from cold institutional rules into a warm cultural experience. It not only significantly improves employees’ sense of belonging and satisfaction, but also enables the corporate culture of “inclusion” to take root in every detail, ultimately consolidating into a deep driving force for the organization’s continued development.

Percentage responsibility:

Aligning employee benefits with social responsibility

In traditional benefits systems, the beneficiaries are often limited to employees themselves or their families. PepsiCo’s innovation lies in extending the benefits philosophy to a broader layer of social responsibility, enabling a responsibility transmission from caring for employees’ “small home” to empowering society’s “big home.”

“Our benefits philosophy is ‘warmth with boundaries.’ This warmth should be delivered not only to employees and their families, but also extended into the social sphere.” Xu Yi explained. Under this philosophy, in 2026, PepsiCo will upgrade the “Pepsi Family Portrait” benefits system based on its global social responsibility philosophy, “Pepsi Way (PEP positive).” It will work with an external foundation to launch a public-welfare project, empowering rural mothers and caring for left-behind children.

Behind the design of this project is insight gained through a deep understanding of employees. Xu Yi shared, “Many of PepsiCo’s frontline workers come from rural areas. Their children stay in their hometowns, cared for by elders, becoming left-behind children.” The voices of this group also became an important opportunity for the project to take root. In its research, PepsiCo heard many heartfelt accounts from frontline employees. Because their work requires them to go out for employment, they are separated from their children by a thousand miles. They can only maintain family affection through video calls. They not only miss important moments such as their children’s birthdays and parent meetings, but they are also constantly worried about their children’s health, safety, and mental state. Guilt and anxiety intertwine, yet they also hope that schools and society can provide more care for the physical and mental well-being of left-behind children.

In the 2026 benefits upgrade, for the first time, PepsiCo introduced a public-welfare donation mechanism on top of the existing free choice of benefits points under “Pepsi Family Portrait.” It opened two dual-donation channels: using benefits points and donating cash. Employees can voluntarily donate the unused remaining points from the 2024 and 2025 periods; the donation amount is defined independently by the individual. If there are no available points, employees can also donate cash through a method of tax-after payroll offset. When benefits points are linked with projects supporting rural mothers and left-behind children, many workers actively participate. Data shows that after the project was rolled out, a total of 297 employees participated in donations, including 247 participants from the frontline worker group.

“The meaning of benefits is not only to safeguard employees’ lives, but also to convey the company’s values.” Xu Yi said, “When employees participate in public welfare through benefits, they can genuinely feel that their company not only pursues commercial success, but also actively assumes social responsibility. This is the core meaning of the ‘percentage responsibility’ pillar in our benefits framework. And the resulting cultural identity is a core competitive advantage for attracting and retaining talent.”

By combining the benefits system with innovative social responsibility efforts, PepsiCo helps employees participate in public welfare while enjoying protections and enhancing the sense of meaning in their work. As Xu Yi said, “We hope that through this project, employees will know our care is three-dimensional—not only focusing on the happiness of each small home, but also encouraging everyone to pass this care on to the broader social big family.”

A health benefits system with warmth is not only a competitive advantage for attracting and retaining talent, but also a foundation in an uncertain era for building organizational resilience, energizing employees, and fulfilling corporate citizen responsibility. By building the “Pepsi Family Portrait” ecosystem with internal and external coordination across “100% protection, 100% happiness, and 100% responsibility,” PepsiCo not only provides comprehensive care for employees, but also fuses individual well-being with social value creation—making benefits a bridge. This bridge both enhances the sense of belonging and organizational resilience of the company’s “small home,” while continuously delivering care and positive energy to society’s “big home.” It truly achieves win-win coexistence among corporate, employee, and social value.