PepsiCo has signalled that its Asia-Pacific sustainability push is moving from experimentation towards possible roll-out, after signing letters of intent with five returning startups from its Greenhouse Accelerator programme, including Australian firms Adiona and X-Centric Sciences.
The agreements do not guarantee deployment, but they indicate that PepsiCo and the startups will keep working on whether the technologies can satisfy commercial and operational requirements across t...
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he region. The five companies in the 2026 IMPACT Edition are Adiona, Bali Waste Cycle, Beijing AIForce Tech, Takachar and X-Centric Sciences.
PepsiCo said the seven-month programme was designed to go further than the early-stage pilot work that has characterised previous cohorts. This year’s edition brought founders into closer contact with teams across sustainability, supply chain, procurement, research and development, operations, finance and legal, with the aim of testing whether promising tools could withstand the demands of everyday business. The company also widened its partner network to include venture capital, academic and innovation groups, reflecting a stronger emphasis on adoption rather than grant-funded trials.
In Australia, Adiona has been working on logistics optimisation for PepsiCo’s China operations. The company and PepsiCo agreed to examine carrier procurement and network planning, including how to make deliveries more efficient across the planned Songjiang network. Adiona’s modelling suggested that the changes could reduce driver duty hours by as much as 12.1% and cut distance travelled, together with modelled emissions, by up to 2.3%. Those figures remain projections rather than realised savings.
X-Centric Sciences, meanwhile, has been testing precision soil intelligence in Australia with PepsiCo’s agriculture team. After field trials, the two sides signed a letter of intent to continue looking at how nutrient data could be used to target fertiliser more accurately. PepsiCo’s pilot analysis indicated that such an approach could trim fertiliser use by 2.8% by shifting inputs from richer to poorer patches of soil, instead of applying a uniform treatment across a field. The issue has taken on added weight as disruption to fertiliser supply routes has increased concern about global availability. X-Centric Sciences has also won attention beyond the PepsiCo programme, after being chosen for Google DeepMind’s first AI for the Planet accelerator in Asia-Pacific.
Elsewhere in the cohort, Beijing AIForce Tech is seeking to extend an existing partnership in China around electric farm machinery. Its 140 horsepower electric tractor is already in use under a five-year commercial lease with PepsiCo China for potato farming, while a larger 180 horsepower version is still being tested. Bali Waste Cycle is discussing a broader role for packaging recovery and recycling in Indonesia, having already repurposed recovered snack packaging into street signs in Denpasar and Gianyar and explored demand from tourism and corporate customers. Takachar, which builds portable systems that convert agricultural residues into biochar, has also signed a letter of intent to keep assessing potential uses across agricultural value chains in Asia-Pacific.
According to PepsiCo, the Greenhouse programme has worked with 30 startups in the region since 2023 and supported 22 pilots spanning circularity, sustainable agriculture and climate-related projects. The company says the latest edition is intended to push beyond proof of concept and into business-ready solutions that can be embedded in day-to-day operations, with the possibility of later global application.
Anne Tse, chief executive for PepsiCo Asia-Pacific, said collaboration with startups was becoming central to the company’s ability to address pressure across the food system. “Building resilient, growing businesses in Asia Pacific will increasingly require collaboration across sectors and capabilities,” she said.
She added: “Through the Greenhouse Accelerator, we are bringing entrepreneurs together with PepsiCo teams to test emerging solutions against real business and operational challenges across the food system. The opportunity goes beyond any single technology or partnership. By working with startups, investors, and other partners, we can help create stronger connections across the innovation ecosystem, explore solutions with the potential to support business resilience and growth,” she said.
The broader programme reflects a wider shift in corporate sustainability initiatives, as large consumer groups move away from small-scale demonstrations and towards solutions that can be measured against cost, supply chain performance and operational resilience. PepsiCo’s approach in Asia-Pacific suggests that the next phase of climate and circularity innovation will be judged not only by environmental impact, but also by whether it can work at industrial scale.
Source: Noah Wire Services
