It was one of the first large foreign bets on Catalonia after the pandemic and, far from repenting, PepsiCo re-opt Barcelona. The company will extend the responsibility of the global digitization hub which opened in the city a year ago and will establish here a unit dedicated to the investment in startups. “We have teams in Israel and in the West Coast who are in charge of looking for investment options of the venture capital and of the ‘business angels‘: I want Barcelona to be the third location”, says the Group Global Vice President and Head of Strategy and Transformation, Athina Kanioura. Visiting the center this week, the board of directors explains that the plans for this year also include closing collaboration agreements with three Catalan universities so that their students collaborate much more actively with the ‘hub’ and for hiring a hundred people to advance the goal of reaching 400 workers in 2025.
The board explains that, this first year, efforts have focused on establishing themselves, attracting staff and exploring what is necessary to retain them within the company. Once this phase is over, “it is time to activate the technological ecosystem and ‘startups’”, says Kanioura. “There is a very vibrant community and now that the team has established itself and is going to grow, it is time to start activating this ecosystem,” she details.
His intention is that PepsiCo participate and collaborate much more actively with the Barcelona entrepreneurial fabric, and that it does so both by incubating new projects and strategically investing in those that are more advanced. In this sense, the company confesses to already having on its radar the occasional company dedicated to the logistics a from financial technology.
This does not imply, in any case, that the basic function of the center changes: devise innovation projectscome up with new ways of operating or carrying out processesdevelop solutions that help achieve company objectives and materialize a new culture within the company.
The ‘hub’ is so important internally that the executive is clear that not even the drums of global crisis they will make you lose weight within the company. First, because the company is doing well. Second, because it has been sensible (“We have not suddenly hired 400 people just to show that we hire technological talent”, he points out). Third, because the center works in favor of two major priorities of the company: the sustainability and the digital transformation. Without going any further, the team is working, for example, on a tool that helps the general management to rule out the production of new products that go against their sustainable objectives.
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Another of this year’s objectives is to work much more in line with the catalan universities (they are about to announce an agreement with three of them) and, at the same time, have as many workers pass through Barcelona as possible so that they can soak up the way of working here. “Our vision is that the ‘hub’ becomes a guide for how the digital talent and the data culture they will be developed in the company: we don’t want this to be an island”, assures the same, which has in its favor, it says, that people want to come to work in Barcelona.
And here is a first conclusion that goes against one of the great topics of the sector: the deficit of workers. “There is no lack of talent, what happens is that people want to work in good companies”, analyzes the board. PepsiCo’s hub has about 130 employees right now, expects to have 250 a year from now, and around 350 the next. The other big challenge is to increase the women’s quota, which is now at 32%. “Write down my words: in 2025, 50% of this workforce will be women, it is my personal commitment,” concludes the vice president of the company.