PepsiCo CEO and chairman Indra Nooyi says that as her industry undergoes tectonic shifts, it’s either the “most exciting time to be the CEO of a food and beverage company, or the most frightening.”
And perhaps nothing has the potential to disrupt her industry more than Amazon (AMZN), which recently acquired Whole Foods.
Nooyi, speaking at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, didn’t shy away from acknowledging just how formidable a competitor the tech giant has become. With its acquisition of the high-end grocer, she says, Amazon now has a strong retail footprint, access to the natural and organic market, and insight into how to create a powerful private label brand—a key differentiator for Whole Foods with its 365-branded products.
These elements, coupled with Amazon’s massive amounts of consumer data, makes the e-commerce giant even more powerful.
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We’re in an “environment where you just have to dream about something, and it’s going to show up in your home,” Nooyi says. “There’s so much data on you that they can almost anticipate what you’re going to order.”
Nooyi, who says she has not talked to Jeff Bezos since the acquisition, quipped that she would like to tell the Amazon CEO to take a long vacation. “I’ll pay for it,” she jokes. “Every aspect of every vertical he’s disrupting. Every retailer would chip in for the Jeff Bezos fund. He’s a true visionary.”
Nooyi says that it’s “critically important that our big brands are represented on Amazon.” PepsiCo (PEP) has to innovate in order to create excitement online in order to create impulse purchases in new ways. “Our strategy is not about shelf space,” she says. “It’s about how to get the right clicks so we move up in the search process.”
The company is on track to hit about $1 billion in e-commerce sales by the end of the year, says the CEO. She notes that PepsiCo’s e-commerce team is purposefully located in Manhattan and California, away from its headquarters in Purchase, N.Y. “We want them to be a tech company,” she says.
For more on Nooyi, read Fortune‘s Oct. 1, 2017 cover story.
