PepsiCo Pursues a Virtual Future

PepsiCo is looking for sustainable packaging solutions while ensuring that these solutions are resistant to damage during shipping and on the shelf.

Using the SIMULIA brand's Abaqus technology and the Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE platform, PepsiCo can test packaging using the Virtual First Principle to evaluate products before conducting physical trials.

Simulation for Food and Beverage Packaging

Like most consumer packaged goods companies, innovation is important to win market share and bring new products to market. This requires overcoming challenges related to materials selection, waste reduction, manufacturing, recyclability, and product transportation. Using a combination of modeling and simulation, and advanced rapid prototyping, PepsiCo is working on several initiatives to improve the packaging development process for gains in productivity, quality, and sustainability.

Pepsi is likely one of the first beverages one thinks of when it comes to soft drinks. PepsiCo is much more than just its popular namesake beverage. The corporation has a large Food and Beverage Portfolio, in which twenty-three of the brands  – including Pepsi-Cola, Quaker Oats, Tropicana, Lay’s, and Gatorade – are generating more than $1 billion each in retail sales every year. All of these brands' development work involves a lot of processing and packaging – and that’s where simulation plays a large role.

I think the Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE platform is a great cloud-based environment for collaboration, but also we can put our simulation data in a single platform, and we can track the information after. If you ask me how I could access the simulation results from three years ago, it’s going to take me a long time to dig through my own hardware to find it, but if we can store all the simulation data in a single place, that can reduce the time. It increases traceability.

Dr. Ellie Vineyard

Dr. Ellie Vineyard, Associate Principal Engineer at PepsiCo

SIMULIA Champion

Challenge

PepsiCo is looking for sustainable packaging solutions while ensuring that their products are resistant to damage during shipping and on the shelf.

Solution

The company uses the SIMULIA brand's Abaqus technology and the Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE platform to virtually test its packaging, using the Virtual First Principle to evaluate products before conducting any physical trials.

Benefits

By bringing simulation and process evaluation in-house with SIMULIA simulation applications, PepsiCo is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and reducing development time for its beverage packaging.

Continue the Conversation!

Join the SIMULIA Community to watch the replay of the PepsiCo Keynote presentation, PepsiCo Beverage Packaging Simulation Democratization, from the 2021 North American Regional User Meeting.