PepsiCo, Inc. - BDS-1000 Forensic Dossier

Key Findings

• Economic: PepsiCo’s two direct Israeli-linked corporate holdings are SodaStream International Ltd., wholly owned since PepsiCo’s ~$3.2bn acquisition (completed late 2018), and Sabra Dipping Company LLC, wholly owned since PepsiCo bought out Strauss Group’s 50% stake for ~$244m in November 2024.¹²
• Settlements (historical): SodaStream’s manufacturing plant at Mishor Adumim, in the Ma’ale Adumim settlement bloc, closed in 2015 - three years before PepsiCo’s acquisition - and relocated to the Negev inside Israel’s pre-1967 lines.³
• Political: PepsiCo’s only public statement on the post-October 2023 war expressed support for employees “in Israel and Gaza” and pledged $1m in relief funding, with no operational suspension of the kind PepsiCo applied to Russia in 2022.⁴⁵
• Not found: No public evidence was identified in any of the four domain audits of a PepsiCo defence-contracting relationship with Israeli security bodies, or of any Israeli-origin surveillance, biometric, or military technology integrated into PepsiCo’s operations.

Target Profile

Key Facts:

• SodaStream International Ltd. is headquartered at Airport City near Ben Gurion Airport and manufactures at Idan HaNegev (Lehavim), in the Negev, employing roughly 1,400–2,000 workers, about one-third Bedouin Arab.⁹¹⁰¹¹
• Sabra Dipping Company LLC became a wholly-owned PepsiCo subsidiary in November 2024; Strauss Group retained an option to acquire a 2.5% stake in PepsiCo’s Israeli salty-snacks business.¹²²
• Modern Group, owned by the Yazji Group since 1996, operates a PepsiCo franchise bottling facility in Jericho, West Bank, with ~60 million litres/year capacity and ~200 employees serving roughly 2.5 million West Bank customers.¹³¹⁴

Executive Summary

PepsiCo’s documented nexus to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories runs overwhelmingly through corporate ownership and commercial licensing rather than through military, security, or surveillance-technology channels. The company’s clearest and most material connection is its 2018 acquisition of SodaStream International Ltd., an Israel-incorporated consumer-hardware manufacturer, for approximately $3.2 billion, and its November 2024 acquisition of full ownership of Sabra Dipping Company from joint-venture partner Strauss Group for approximately $244 million.¹⁵¹⁶¹² Both transactions bring pre-existing Israeli commercial and, in Sabra’s case, historically military-adjacent associations within PepsiCo’s corporate perimeter, but neither transaction itself constitutes a defence, security, or surveillance relationship.

The economic domain audit finds the deepest and most substantiated record: PepsiCo has an active, wholly-owned Israeli manufacturing subsidiary (SodaStream, Negev-based since 2015), a licensed Israeli bottling partner (Strauss Group, distributing Pepsi-Cola beverages within Israel), and a West Bank franchise bottler (Modern Group/Yazji Group, Jericho) that has operated continuously since 2018.¹⁷¹³ The political domain audit documents a company that treats Israel as an ordinary commercial market, issued one balanced statement following the October 2023 attacks referencing both Israeli and Gazan associates, and - notably - did not extend to Israel/Gaza the kind of operational suspension it applied to Russia over Ukraine in 2022.⁴⁵

Critically, the historical settlement dimension of this record predates PepsiCo’s ownership. SodaStream’s Mishor Adumim plant, in the Ma’ale Adumim settlement bloc, was the subject of sustained NGO and press scrutiny - including the widely reported 2014 Scarlett Johansson/Oxfam episode - but the plant closed in 2015, three years before PepsiCo acquired the company, following relocation to the Negev inside Israel’s internationally recognised pre-1967 territory, assisted by an Israeli government relocation grant.^1831920 Who Profits conducted a field verification in December 2015 confirming the withdrawal and subsequently removed SodaStream from its settlement database.²¹ No audit identified any PepsiCo or post-acquisition SodaStream operation inside occupied territory.

What is not supported by the evidence is, notably, the entire military domain: no public evidence was found of any PepsiCo contract, tender, or supply relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence, the IDF, or any Israeli defence prime contractor, and no dual-use or defence-configured PepsiCo product line exists. The digital domain is similarly unsupported: PepsiCo’s cloud vendors (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS) are commodity commercial relationships with no structural link to Israel’s Project Nimbus government-cloud contract, and the sole confirmed Israeli-origin technology vendor, Trax Retail, is a shelf-analytics firm with no security or surveillance application. The one area warranting continued scrutiny is Sabra: Strauss Group, PepsiCo’s former 50% Sabra joint-venture partner, has a documented history of funding IDF combat units through an “Adopt a Warrior” programme, a relationship that predates and is separate from Sabra itself, but which entered PepsiCo’s corporate orbit through the joint venture and is now more attenuated following PepsiCo’s November 2024 buyout of Strauss’s stake.²²

Taken together, this evidentiary record - concentrated economic and political exposure, materially absent military and digital exposure, and a discontinued rather than live settlement history - supports a BRS score of 590, placing PepsiCo in Tier C (High), driven principally by the Economic score of 6.96.

Timeline of Relevant Events

Corporate Overview

PepsiCo, Inc. is a North Carolina-incorporated, NASDAQ-listed (PEP) global food and beverage conglomerate headquartered in Purchase, New York, with no golden shares, founder shares, or state-linked governance features.⁶ Israel is not disclosed as a discrete reporting segment; it falls within PepsiCo’s broader AMESA/AMENA (Africa, Middle East, and South/North Africa) division, and no Israel-specific revenue figure is published.⁶

PepsiCo’s most direct Israeli corporate holding is SodaStream International Ltd., acquired for ~$3.2bn and operated as a wholly-owned subsidiary headquartered at Airport City, near Ben Gurion International Airport, with its principal manufacturing plant at Idan HaNegev Industrial Park, Lehavim, in the Negev - inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders and outside occupied territory.⁹¹⁰ The Negev facility employs approximately 1,400–2,000 workers, roughly one-third of whom are Bedouin Arab, with over 100 Palestinians reportedly holding Israeli work permits.¹¹

Sabra Dipping Company LLC, a Virginia-based hummus manufacturer, was a 50/50 joint venture between PepsiCo and Strauss Group until PepsiCo acquired Strauss’s stake for ~$244m in November 2024, making Sabra a wholly-owned PepsiCo subsidiary.²¹² Strauss Group retains an option to acquire a 2.5% stake in PepsiCo’s Israeli salty-snacks business.¹²

Within Israel proper, Pepsi-Cola branded beverages are manufactured and distributed not by PepsiCo directly but under license by Strauss Group (Israel’s second-largest food and beverage company, historically operating as “Pepsi-Cola Products Israel”), which retains sales profits subject to licensing/royalty flows to PepsiCo.¹⁷ In the West Bank, PepsiCo brands are bottled and distributed under franchise by Modern Group, owned by the Yazji Group since 1996, from a 10,000 sqm facility in Jericho with ~60 million litres/year capacity, serving approximately 2.5 million West Bank customers with roughly 200 employees; production reportedly fell about 35% amid post-October 2023 supply disruption.¹³¹⁴

Domain Summaries

Military: Military

Mechanism of Involvement

No public evidence was identified of any direct contract, tender, or defence-cooperation relationship between PepsiCo and the Israeli Ministry of Defence, IDF, Israel Prison Service, or Israel Border Police, across SEC filings, Israeli defence-tender records, and international defence-exhibition directories. The historical exception concerns the pre-PepsiCo Mishor Adumim plant (see Timeline/Corporate Overview), which closed in 2015, and Sabra’s former joint-venture link to Strauss Group, a documented historical funder of IDF Golani and Givati Brigade welfare programmes; PepsiCo’s November 2024 purchase of Strauss’s Sabra stake brings that historical association within PepsiCo’s corporate perimeter, though it concerns Strauss’s separate operations, not Sabra or PepsiCo directly.²²²

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

PepsiCo’s product portfolio (Pepsi, Lay’s, Gatorade, Quaker, Tropicana, SodaStream) is exclusively civilian-consumer; no ruggedised, mil-spec, or dual-use variant of any product has been identified, and food/beverage goods are not subject to strategic export-control licensing. The Mishor Adumim plant closed three years before PepsiCo’s acquisition and was operated entirely by independent, pre-acquisition SodaStream management. No NGO source (Who Profits, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Oxfam) alleges a military-supply relationship for either SodaStream or PepsiCo; all such reporting concerns settlement economics and labour conditions, not arms or security-service provision, and is dated pre-2020.²¹ A structural evidentiary gap is acknowledged: whether PepsiCo products reach IDF personnel via ordinary commercial retail distribution cannot be assessed from public sources, but this is a gap common to all FMCG companies operating in Israel and does not constitute a procurement relationship.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

Digital: Digital

Mechanism of Involvement

PepsiCo’s enterprise technology stack (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, SAP S/4HANA, Accenture, IBM) contains no confirmed Israeli-origin cybersecurity, biometric, or surveillance vendor. The sole confirmed Israeli-origin technology relationship is with Trax Retail, a Tel Aviv/Singapore-headquartered computer-vision firm providing shelf-monitoring and planogram-compliance analytics, documented as a PepsiCo client relationship between approximately 2017 and 2019; its current status cannot be confirmed from public sources.²⁶

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

Trax’s technology analyses product placement on retail shelves, not individuals, biometric data, or personal surveillance. No public evidence identified of PepsiCo licensing any Israeli-origin cybersecurity, facial-recognition, or workforce-monitoring platform (Check Point, CyberArk, SentinelOne, Wiz, Verint, NICE, Palo Alto, Claroty). PepsiCo’s cloud vendors are the same U.S.-headquartered hyperscalers used by Project Nimbus, Israel’s $1.2bn government-cloud contract, but PepsiCo is an ordinary commercial customer of those platforms with no identified structural mechanism connecting it to Nimbus.²⁷ PepsiCo has itself been the victim, not a provider, of cyber-intrusion (a January 2023 Maine data-breach notification and a claimed July 2023 SiegedSec intrusion).²⁸

Named Entities and Evidence Map

Economic: Economic

Mechanism of Involvement

This is the domain with the deepest documented record. PepsiCo directly owns SodaStream International Ltd. (acquired ~$3.2bn, completed late 2018), an Israeli-incorporated manufacturer with active Negev operations, and Sabra Dipping Company LLC (wholly owned since November 2024, ~$244m buyout of Strauss Group’s stake).¹² PepsiCo also licenses Pepsi-Cola beverage manufacturing and distribution within Israel to Strauss Group, and franchises West Bank bottling to Modern Group (Yazji Group), a Jericho-based facility supplying ~2.5 million West Bank customers.¹⁷¹³ SodaStream’s historical Mishor Adumim settlement-zone plant (1997–2015) is documented as a past contributor to the settlement economy, per Who Profits, prior to its 2015 relocation to the Negev.¹⁸

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

The settlement-linked plant closed in 2015, three years before PepsiCo’s ownership began, and relocated to Israel proper with the assistance of an Israeli government relocation grant; SodaStream’s current Negev workforce includes substantial Bedouin Arab employment.¹⁹¹¹ PepsiCo does not disclose Israel-specific revenue - Israel falls within the broader AMESA segment with no country-level breakout - indicating the Israeli operation is not flagged by the company as materially significant on a standalone basis.⁶ No evidence was identified of PepsiCo engaging in settlement-origin agricultural sourcing, mislabeling, or regulatory non-compliance with UK/EU settlement-labeling rules post-2015.²⁹ Modern Group is an independent franchisee (Yazji Group ownership since 1996), not a PepsiCo subsidiary, limiting direct corporate attribution for its West Bank operations.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

Political: Political

Mechanism of Involvement

PepsiCo’s political posture is defined by continuity: it treats Israel as an ordinary commercial market, with Israel/Palestine given no distinct risk-factor treatment in SEC filings.⁶ Its sole substantive statement following the October 2023 attacks supported employees “in Israel and Gaza” and pledged $1m in humanitarian relief with 2:1 employee-donation matching, but PepsiCo issued no operational suspension for Israel/Gaza comparable to its March 2022 suspension of Pepsi-Cola sales, capital investment, and advertising in Russia.⁴⁵ CEO Ramon Laguarta publicly committed, at the 2018 acquisition announcement, to keeping SodaStream production in Israel for 15 years.⁷ SodaStream’s earlier “Made in Israel” brand identity has, post-acquisition, shifted toward sustainability-focused messaging.²³ Sabra, now wholly PepsiCo-owned, carries forward Strauss Group’s historical, separately-documented IDF brigade-support association as a point of continued BDS-campaign attention.²²³⁰

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

No evidence was identified of PepsiCo lobbying on anti-BDS legislation, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, or Middle East trade policy, nor of PAC contributions to pro-Israel legislative caucuses.³¹ No evidence was found of corporate donations to Israeli military-welfare funds, settlement-infrastructure bodies, or “Brand Israel” campaign participation, nor of any current PepsiCo executive making public statements on the conflict beyond the single October 2023 release.⁷ PepsiCo does not appear in the UN OHCHR’s 2025 business-and-settlements database (A/HRC/60/19) or its predecessor iterations, and a 2018 announcement of a subcontractor-backed Gaza factory was never implemented.³²²⁹²⁵ PepsiCo’s Human Rights Policy and Supplier Code of Conduct contain no language specific to occupied-territory operations or product-origin labelling, consistent with the absence of documented activity in that area.³³³⁴

Named Entities and Evidence Map

BDS-1000 Score (V4)

• V_MAX: 6.96 Avg_OTHERS: 0.59
• BRS Score: 590 Tier: C (High)

The BRS is driven almost entirely by Economic (6.96), reflecting PepsiCo’s wholly-owned Israeli manufacturing subsidiary (SodaStream), its wholly-owned Sabra subsidiary, and its licensed/franchised Israeli and West Bank distribution network - the only domain where Impact, Magnitude, and Proximity are all documented as high. Political contributes a secondary, more modest score (1.77) reflecting political continuity and brand-heritage factors rather than active advocacy. Military and Digital are effectively null, reflecting the audits’ consistent finding of no defence, security, or surveillance-technology nexus. The resulting Tier C (High) classification reflects material, ongoing economic integration combined with the near-total absence of military or digital involvement.

Method note: Scores use a scale-free Impact × Magnitude/Proximity model applied strictly to evidence documented in the four domain audits, as vetted by human reviewers; nothing here is inferred beyond audit content.

Methodology Note

• All findings are evidence-only, drawn strictly from the four domain audits (Military, Digital, Economic, Political) compiled for PepsiCo; no allegation outside those audits was considered or scored.
• Scoring is scale-free: Impact (I) reflects the category of activity involved (e.g., wholly-owned manufacturing vs. arm’s-length licensing), Magnitude (M) reflects the scale of that activity (transaction value, workforce, revenue relevance), and Proximity (P) reflects directness of the corporate nexus (subsidiary vs. franchisee vs. no relationship).
• A temporal mitigation rule applies: divested, closed, or relocated operations - such as SodaStream’s 2015 exit from the Mishor Adumim settlement plant, three years before PepsiCo’s ownership began - are treated as discontinued/mitigated rather than scored as live exposure.
• An entity-attribution rule prohibits transitive guilt: Strauss Group’s separate, ongoing military-welfare activity is not imputed to PepsiCo beyond the specific Sabra ownership perimeter and period in which PepsiCo held or holds an interest.
• The historical Mishor Adumim settlement-zone operation is dual-counted across Economic (economic activity in occupied territory) and Political (settlement-related political exposure) per the framework’s convention, notwithstanding that it predates PepsiCo ownership and is treated as discontinued.
• “No public evidence identified” is used verbatim throughout wherever the underlying domain audits found no supporting material after checking the stated source classes (SEC filings, NGO/UN databases, trade press, litigation dockets, export-control registries).