PepsiCo and Gatik have announced a multi-year strategic partnership to deploy autonomous freight operations in North America, bringing driverless trucks into one of the world’s largest food and beverage supply chains.
The agreement marks the largest commercial autonomous freight deployment to date, with Gatik currently operating driverless trucks for PepsiCo across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas inside the company’s regional transportation networks.
The partnership focuses on high-frequency, time-sensitive regional freight operations, where PepsiCo products move daily from site to site. For large shippers, these middle-mile and regional routes are critical to maintaining consistent product flow across distribution centers, stores, and other customer locations.
“Serving our vast network of customers requires a supply chain that is safe, reliable, and built for the future,” said Jim Farrell, senior vice president of supply chain at PepsiCo. “Gatik is already operating inside our networks and brings the autonomous freight technology, commercial experience, and scale we need to strengthen service, add capacity, and move products more consistently for our customers.”
The announcement highlights a key shift in autonomous trucking: moving from technology demonstrations to commercial operations embedded inside a major shipper’s existing network. Rather than focusing only on long-haul highway autonomy, the PepsiCo-Gatik agreement centers on regional logistics routes that require frequent, repeatable movements across highways and surface streets.
Gatik’s driverless trucks are designed for end-to-end deliveries across both highways and surface streets, with dynamic route orchestration capabilities for regional logistics networks that can include hundreds of pickup and drop-off locations. That flexibility allows PepsiCo to modify route plans based on daily operational needs, including changing stops, responding to demand shifts, and adapting to activity levels across distribution centers.
“Autonomous trucking has reached commercial scale when it operates inside one of the most demanding supply chains on the planet,” said Gautam Narang, CEO and co-founder of Gatik. “That is what Gatik is doing with PepsiCo. Our autonomous trucks are already moving products every day across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas, and this partnership is proof that Gatik is becoming central to how the world’s largest companies move goods.”
Gatik’s first deployment with PepsiCo began in 2022. The company said it now operates with more than 98% on-time delivery across its operations. The PepsiCo deployment is focused on adding capacity in high-demand regional networks that are hard to staff and important to keeping products moving.
