PepsiCo this week announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Gatik AI Inc., a develoautonomous systems for middle-mile logistics. Gatik will bring autonomous freight into PepsiCo’s North America food and beverage supply chain.
Today, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company is already operating for PepsiCo across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas. The new partnership focuses on PepsiCo’s regional transportation networks, where Gatik moves products daily from site to site. These networks are high-frequency, time-sensitive, and essential to keeping products flowing consistently.
“Serving our vast network of customers requires a supply chain that is safe, reliable, and built for the future,” said Jim Farrell, the senior vice president of supply chain at PepsiCo. “Gatik is already operating inside our networks and brings the autonomous freight technology, commercial experience, and scale we need to strengthen service, add capacity, and move products more consistently for our customers.”
Inside Gatik’s autonomous freight operations
Gatik designed its autonomous trucks for end-to-end deliveries across highways and surface streets. It features dynamic route-orchestration capabilities designed for complex regional logistics networks spanning hundreds of pickup and drop-off locations.
This enables PepsiCo to modify route plans in response to daily operational needs. It can add or remove stops, respond to shifts in demand, and adapt to activity levels across distribution centers. Autonomous vehicles can reduce variability, improve on-time performance, and add capacity without requiring major changes to its existing operations, claimed Gatik.
The company’s first deployment with PepsiCo was in 2022. Today, Gatik said it operates with more than 98% on-time delivery across its operations. The partners said their agreement builds on PepsiCo’s experience running one of North America’s largest private fleets. It also brings Gatik’s autonomous freight capabilities into real, day-to-day supply chain operations.
“Autonomous trucking has reached commercial scale when it operates inside one of the most demanding supply chains on the planet,” stated Gautam Narang, co-founder and CEO of Gatik. “That is what Gatik is doing with PepsiCo. Our autonomous trucks are already moving products every day across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas, and this partnership is proof that Gatik is becoming central to how the world’s largest companies move goods.”
PepsiCo says automation strengthens its supply chain
PepsiCo said its products are enjoyed by consumers more than 1 billion times a day in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. The company asserted that its collaboration with Gatik will strengthen its supply chain network.
The self-driving trucks are a practical way to improve delivery consistency, add capacity, and support customer service across a complex, high-volume operation, said PepsiCo. It also marks a major commercial milestone for Gatik, which is now delivering autonomous freight at commercial scale inside one of the world’s largest and most demanding consumer goods supply chains.
PepsiCo said its approach is grounded in workforce planning and continued investment in its people. Both PepsiCo and Gatik said they are adding capacity where it’s needed most: high-demand regional networks that are hard to staff and critical to keeping shelves stocked for consumers.
Gatik said it is supporting PepsiCo’s frontline teams with greater flexibility, consistency, and reliability across the transportation network, as well as ensuring that PepsiCo’s people grow with the future of the business.
Source: therobotreport.com
Compiled from international media by the SCI.AI editorial team.
