Guide to PepsiCo Internships: Programs and Application Tips

PepsiCo products are everywhere, from the Quaker Oats we eat for breakfast and the Tostitos we bring to parties, to the Gatorade we drink after a workout. If you’re interested in working for North America’s largest food and beverage company, PepsiCo internships are a great way to get your foot in the door. 

What Is a PepsiCo Internship?

PepsiCo internships are 8-12 week-long summer programs that allow undergraduates and recent graduates to do real-life projects across company functions, from finance and sales to design and research and development (R&D). Throughout your internship, you’ll learn crucial job skills and more about different roles, and get professional feedback and access to a network of mentors and peers. Some PepsiCo internships are paid. Payment is based on a non-negotiable hourly rate accounting for the role, degree discipline, degree level, and location.

PepsiCo prides itself on internships as a gateway to full-time employment at the company. In the U.S. and Canada, nearly half of PepsiCo interns (46%) convert to full-time employees; almost all program finishers (89.5%) stay at PepsiCo for two years or more. 

Previous interns gave PepsiCo 4.3 stars on Glassdoor and 82% would recommend PepsiCo internships to a friend. Many reviews praise the company’s culture, sharing that other employees were helpful and kind. Other positive reviews also mention the internship pay, which students rate 4.4 stars overall. The most common con in intern reviews is the internship work location.

Who Is Eligible for PepsiCo Internships?

PepsiCo U.S. internships are typically for undergraduate and graduate students; each job description clarifies what degree you need to pursue or have completed, and what class year the company’s looking for, if applicable. 

Most PepsiCo internships require students to have some experience in the area they’re applying for, but that doesn’t mean you need professional work experience. In fact, the company states that relevant coursework and other internships count! PepsiCo also looks for soft skills like strong work ethic, time management, organization, and a willingness to learn. While not all internship job descriptions require a specific GPA, some positions require at least a 3.0-3.2 average. Many internships at the company are limited to students with indefinite right to work in the U.S.

PepsiCo Internship Opportunities

Applications Currently Open

PepsiCo has internship opportunities across a wide variety of career interests, from creative careers like design to technical careers in supply chain. 

Finance PepsiCo Internships

Finance PepsiCo internships range from accounting and audit to more strategic finance roles. 

Accounting Control

You’ll work on accounting tasks in various functional areas as an accounting control intern. The accounting control department at PepsiCo is comprised of the following divisions:

• Internal and external financial reporting
• Cost accounting
• Trade spend
• Advertising and marketing
• Accounting
• Contract manufacturing accounting

Accounting control interns work on control activities like general ledger reviews, P&L, cash flows, balance sheet reviews, and reporting. 

PepsiCo is looking for students pursuing degrees in accounting. Candidates should be proficient in Excel and PowerPoint, involved in at least one extracurricular activity, have analytical skills, and be interested in becoming a certified public accountant. 

Corporate Audit

The corporate audit team at Pepsico sits at the intersection of finance, I.T., and business. Interns on the team will learn how to use the PepsiCo internal control framework to help identify risk and evaluate the effectiveness of risk-mitigating activities. They’ll get exposure to what’s being audited in the business and process, use data and analytics to support risk identification, and help with operational, compliance, financial, and IT audits.

The corporate audit internship is typically for students pursuing a master’s degree — either a master’s degree in accounting, management of information systems, or business — with a graduation date within two years of internship completion. PepsiCo is also looking for students who intend to complete an audit certification after graduation.

Strategic Finance

The strategic finance internship is for graduate students pursuing an MBA in finance or other related areas. Students contribute to PepsiCo’s “Winning with Purpose” vision by playing four key roles:

• Trustee: enhancing enterprise value
• Integrator: delivering sustainable performance and results
• Catalyst: reshaping the business and creating change
• Navigator: setting the long-term strategy and target agenda

Interns will get experience across various functional areas of the business, including brand and A&M finance, financial planning, sales and commercial finance, revenue management, supply chain finance, and mergers and acquisitions. The exact functional area(s) you’ll work in depends on the office location to which you apply.

Supply Chain Finance

The supply chain finance internship is a fast-track training program for accounting and finance positions in PepsiCo’s supply chain division. Interns will gain training and experience across various accounting processes and financial analyses, including:

• Forecasting methods
• Cost and variance analysis
• Developing an annual operating plan
• Calculating key performance indicators
• Capital investment analytics and discounted cash flow (DCF) models

Students must be pursuing a degree in finance, accounting, or another related major and have shown interest in cost accounting and operations through coursework or internships. 

Candidates should graduate by the internship’s start date and be interested in career growth at PepsiCo — as this program feeds into accounting and finance roles upon successful completion.

Global Procurement PepsiCo Internships

PepsiCo’s procurement function aims to develop and execute sourcing strategies to deliver best-in-class economics, supply assurance, and sustainability practices. As an intern, you’ll receive a timely question for your team and work strategically to provide a recommendation based on the situation. This project is similar to what full-time employees at PepsiCo do, with the support of your manager and the broader procurement team. 

Examples of timely questions interns have worked on before include:

• What is the best industry-appropriate sustainability scheme to supplement the company’s apple juice source strategy?
• How can PepsiCo track supplier greenhouse gas reductions and optimize results?
• How can PepsiCo increase Black and Hispanic representation in its partnerships and supply chain?

This internship is open to graduate students who will complete an MBA degree within one year of internship completion; additional work experience (3+ years) is preferred.

Human Resources & Administration PepsiCo Internships

A human resources intern at PepsiCo works to help the company’s employees stay safe, work well together, and grow. PepsiCo seeks human resources interns with strong interpersonal, communication, and problem-solving skills. In the role, you’ll learn about various HR processes, principles, and policies by participating in tasks like:

• Assisting with payroll, employee onboarding, and employee benefits
• Assisting with recruitment activities, like interviewing candidates and conducting background checks
• Supporting HR initiatives like employee training programs

Health & Safety

Students specifically interested in fostering the health and safety of PepsiCo employees can work directly on the company’s environmental, health, and safety plan (EHS) in this internship. Students will work on strategies to prevent workplace injuries, environmental incidents, and vehicle accidents, perform risk assessments, and help implement physical or behavior control measures.

PepsiCo is looking for students pursuing a bachelor’s degree who will graduate within one year of the internship’s completion. Students should be self-starters with proven leadership skills.

Marketing & Sales PepsiCo Internships

PepsiCo internships in marketing and sales focus on bringing awareness to and selling products worldwide. 

E-Commerce Sales/Marketing

This project-based internship focuses on a timely question from the e-commerce sales, marketing, or strategy team. Over ten weeks, students work strategically and cross-functionally to research and develop a recommendation for a business-critical question. 

Candidates should demonstrate strong analytical, planning, problem-solving, and communication skills. This internship is for undergraduates with a 3.2 GPA or higher who will have a degree within one year of internship completion.

Design 

Design interns work on many design projects to execute a consistent, comprehensive brand and graphic design strategy across PepsiCo’s various food and beverage portfolios. Interested students should be able to demonstrate creative thinking skills, including design-specific skills like storyboarding and illustration, and should include a portfolio in their application.

Food Services

Food services internships are opportunities to actively engage in influential sales with the food service distributor sales team. Interns will help identify customer needs, understand business priorities and models, research customers, and learn about competitors’ performance. 

Students need excellent customer service and leadership skills and must be undergraduates who will have a degree within one year of completing the internship. This internship requires students to have a valid U.S. driver’s license at least three months before the start date and access to a car to drive to various sales locations.

Marketing 

PepsiCo internships in general marketing are project-based and focus on using research and data to tell a story about how you’ll inspire PepsiCo’s target audience to buy the product. Marketing interns may weigh in on product, packaging, communication development, product launch strategies, digital campaigns, and brand positioning.

Sales

A sales internship at PepsiCo allows interns to achieve sales results through a real-world, sales-based project. Projects and responsibilities include:

• Owning customer-facing projects
• Learning how to deliver excellent customer service
• Meeting with senior leadership, peers, frontline employees, and customers to achieve summer sales metrics
• Preparing and delivering sales presentations
• Activating promotions to build brand development

Students must be flexible, have a strong work ethic, and be willing to work in a fast-paced environment. Candidates should be rising juniors who will have a degree within a year of the internship’s end date. This internship also requires candidates to have a valid U.S. driver’s license and access to a car so they can drive to various sales locations. 

Research & Development PepsiCo Internships

Research and development (R&D) at PepsiCo is a department focused on developing and iterating on sustainable, creative, and cost-effective processes, products, and experiences. R&D professionals at PepsiCo work in areas like food sciences, packaging engineering, product engineering, and research analytics.

PepsiCo internships in R&D are for students pursuing an engineering, food science, agriculture, or related degree and who are interested in working in a lab, pilot plant, or manufacturing scale environment. Interns help provide insights and apply technical knowledge to help brainstorm, build, develop, and launch new PepsiCo products. 

Interns may work within any of the following teams:

• Quality
• Sensory
• Food safety
• Data intelligence and management analytics
• External innovation
• Scientific affairs
• Regulatory affairs
• Product crisis and incident management
• Supplier quality assurance
• Nutrition science
• Microbiology

Supply Chain PepsiCo Internships

How do PepsiCo products find their way from development to your snack cabinet? The supply chain department focuses on safely, efficiently, and reliably bringing products to market. These internships require collaboration, leadership, and organizational skills to help analyze and develop the right business processes for the PepsiCo team. You may work on assignments in various functional areas, from production and warehouse operations to transportation engineering and commercialization.

Students must be pursuing a bachelor’s degree in a related field (like engineering, operations and logistics, organizational leadership, or business management) and graduate within one year of internship completion.

E-Commerce Supply Chain

An e-commerce supply chain intern works with senior managers on supply chain-driven initiatives and helps PepsiCo carry out critical business strategies. 

This position is highly collaborative, and interns will work with sales, finance, strategy, and marketing teams on a specific project to answer a timely business question. Interns must use data analytics skills to develop strategic analysis and pitch future supply chain initiatives. 

The PepsiCo team looks for students with strong analytical skills, work ethic, and ability to work in a fast-paced environment. As this internship allows students to work on real-world projects, students need to be able and willing to take on significant accountability to drive business outcomes.

PepsiCo also offers more e-commerce supply chain internships in specific areas, including business intelligence, data science, and data and technology.

Frito-Lay Supply Chain Quality & Food Safety

The Frito Lay internship program offers the opportunity to work on real-world projects and get guidance from the company’s leadership team. Throughout the program, interns may work on tasks like:

• Helping develop and analyze quality and food safety metrics
• Supporting quality and food safety programs with business case product analysis, risk assessments, auditing, process improvement, and issues management
• Working on projects like evaluating sanitation, seasoning studies, labor improvement, and comparative cost analysis

At the end of this program, interns report the key business points they learned to the leadership team. 

PLCI Supply Chain Logistics

Internships with Pepsi Logistics Company, Inc. (PLCI) allow students to understand and support third-party career procurement tracking, coverage, and strategy. This role works with the company’s internal transportation and external customers and suppliers. Interns rotate between two and three roles during the program and end the internship by presenting a project outcome to PLCI leadership.

Students need to be able to use communication skills to build business relationships, negotiation skills to influence outcomes, and learning skills to understand key freight brokerage market dynamics and industry best practices.

PBNA Crop. Supply Chain

PepsiCo Beverages North America (PBNA) also has its own internship in supply chain where students work in one of seven functions. During the application process, you’ll be able to work with a PepsiCo campus representative on which discipline you’re most interested in: 

• Planning: Anticipate product demand and help with product components, production, distribution, and sale.
• Strategy: Support network optimization initiatives using tools like Excel and SAP. 
• Warehouse operations: Manage inventory, improve warehouse productivity, and execute shipments.
• Transportation: Ensure timely, safe, and efficient delivery of goods.
• Customer integration: Serve as a point of contact for customers to ensure they receive flawless order fulfillment and delivery,
• Commercialization: Use project management skills with various cross-functional teams and drive net revenue.
• H.Q. manufacturing and engineering: Support manufacturing and engineering by developing technical training materials, process improvement, and data analysis.
• Routing intelligence: Work with departments like warehouse and sales operations to support and grow the company’s new logistics center.

During this internship, you’ll get access to PepsiCo’s leaders during a speaker series and be able to network with members of employee resource groups at the company. 

Technology PepsiCo Internships

PepsiCo’s technology department covers digital solutions through information technology, cybersecurity, data science and analytics, e-commerce, product and project management, software engineering, strategy, and transformation roles.

Data Analytics, Data Engineer, & Data Science

The data + analytics group at PepsiCo focuses on applying data insights to improve performance across the business. Internships in this department can focus on:

• Data analytics: reporting on analytics to provide business insights and managing reusable and consistent data foundations
• Data engineers: designing and coding key algorithmic structures and managing and evaluating solutions for data processing systems, warehousing services, and database technologies
• Data scientists: building predictive models to measure data difficulty, ambiguity level, and error probability

Students should have technical skills in data architectures, software environments, and data science programming languages. All candidates should graduate with a bachelor’s or master’s degree within a year of completing the internship.

E-Commerce

The e-commerce team in the technology department works to optimize operations through a results-oriented environment that resembles a start-up. Interns working specifically for the e-commerce business intelligence team will apply data warehouse and reporting expertise to build reporting and cloud deployment architectures to help the business.

Interns must be undergraduates with a degree in computer science or STEM field with exposure to data visualization tools and an understanding of a relational database and programming languages like Python and SQL.

Project Coordination & Project Delivery

This internship works with the digital products and services team to design and build digital solutions for the business that help boost efficiency, reduce costs, and maintain return on investment (ROI). Students will work on two main areas:

• Project coordination: planning and managing delivery of technology projects using Agile and Scrum methodologies.
• Product delivery: managing the development and launch of global programs.

Students must be pursuing a degree in a related field and have technical skills like Agile and Scrum methodology, software lifecycle management, product strategy, analytics (specifically SQL), data, and product design. This position requires a minimum 3.0 GPA.

Applying for PepsiCo Internships

Applying for PepsiCo internships is pretty straightforward — you’ll need to use the company’s online portal to submit your materials and then go through interviews. During your application process, show why you’re passionate about the specific role and company and emphasize any relevant experience. 

Application Process

According to PepsiCo’s careers pages, there are three steps to the application process.*

Apply 

Learn more about PepsiCo’s business, culture, and open roles to determine what’s right for you. PepsiCo offers a personal recruiting assistant, Chester Cheetah, to chat with and learn more. Once you’ve found a role, you can apply via the company’s Candidate Zone, an online portal where you’ll upload your resume and fill out application questions. After you’ve applied, you may get prescreening text questions and/or one-way video questions, or an internal recruiter will contact you to review your skills and experience. 

Assess

PepsiCo’s interview process consists of various options for two-way communication. First, an employee may contact you for a telephone or video interview. Then, depending on the specific role, location, and timeliness, they may invite you for additional virtual or in-person interviews. (PepsiCo notes that most interviews occur virtually to ensure everyone’s safety and convenience.)

Some roles may also require assessments using the company’s assessment program, PepHire. PepHire has various job-relevant assessments to learn more about your foundational, professional, and leadership capabilities. 

Offer and Onboarding

If you’re selected for a role, the internal recruitment team will reach out with an offer letter. If you’re not selected, the team will also let you know.

Once you’ve accepted an offer, you’ll need to complete forms within your Candidate Zone (where you applied). Then, you’ll go through a pre-onboarding and virtual onboarding experience.

*Note: This application process describes what it’s like to apply to positions at PepsiCo in general; individual internship processes may vary by role.

Tips for Landing a PepsiCo Internship

To land a PepsiCo internship, make sure to prepare specific examples of your experience that demonstrate your leadership skills and personality. This company is also distributed across the U.S., so be sure to emphasize your willingness to work from different company locations (if you’re willing to move for a job).

Show You’re a Leader

PepsiCo’s applicant help page stresses that any candidate — regardless of the role — should work to demonstrate five leadership principles they call the GREAT5:

• Growth: Show curiosity and lifelong learning by going outside your comfort zone and helping others grow.
• Relationships: Build and maintain strong relationships by being authentic, respectful, and inclusive.
• Execution: Bring energy and enthusiasm to your work to help you accomplish goals and motivate others.
• Agility: Be adaptable and embrace change.
• Thinking: Use external insights and creative and future-forward thinking to make decisions.

In your interview, be sure to think of examples (both academic and professional) where you’ve demonstrated these principles. For example, did you take a Forage job simulation to build skills and learn more about real-world work? That demonstrates growth. Were you captain of your school’s basketball team and motivated the team toward a record-breaking season? That shows execution.

Be Authentic

Focusing on being yourself may feel a little backward when trying to impress a company, but it’s true — you should try to show up authentically in the interview process. Be professional and respectful, but show off your personality by discussing your interests, passions, and how they relate to the role and PepsiCo’s work.

>>MORE: What’s the best career for your personality? Take our free, five-minute personality quiz. 

Being yourself can help you foster a connection with the recruiter or hiring manager and help you stand out from the crowd. Who’s the more memorable person: someone with the same skills and experience as everyone else or someone who talked about how their love for online gaming led to an interest in software engineering? 

If You’re Willing to Relocate It, Show It

Work location is a significant factor in roles at PepsiCo; for example, internships in the same department but different locations may have varying responsibilities because they’re working in other headquarters, like Frito Lay versus Gatorade or Quaker Oats. If you’re willing to relocate, make this known in the application process. This distinction is especially important if you’re interested in a career at PepsiCo after the internship, as you may be offered a role in a different location after the program.

Emphasize Your Experience 

Essentially, all of PepsiCo’s internships are looking for candidates with some level of experience in the field. Don’t panic; most of them don’t require any professional experience. Instead, be sure to emphasize any experience you have within the field, whether that’s classes you took, projects you completed, or extracurricular activities. 

Go to Events 

PepsiCo has a separate campus events page under the “students” section of its website, which means that going to events and connecting and networking with PepsiCo employees is of the utmost importance. 

If PepsiCo is visiting your school for a career fair or information session, you can fill out a quick form to join the PepsiCo talent community. This will share your profile with recruiters, who can then consider and contact you for opportunities that match your skills. 

Once you’ve filled out the form to join the community, be sure to put a face to the name by attending the event and connecting with the recruiter in person.

Ready to start applying for PepsiCo internships? Read our ultimate guide on how to apply for an internship.