Profile: Kate Garner, Senior Vice President, Demand Accelerator NA, PepsiCo

Kate Garner has a history of delivering transformational growth for PepsiCo, having spent nearly 18 years rising through the ranks from where she started in 2003 as an assistant product manager. She’s a classically trained accountant, having worked for Ernst & Young out of college and then at Sprint as a finance manager. But she says early on it became clear that her passion for learning and development would lead to several pivots in her career.After earning an MBA in marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, she landed at PepsiCo/Frito-Lay and began building her now strong track record in marketing, sales, strategic insights and advanced analytics.Mentorship, being a visionary, cultivating strong internal and external partnerships, and servant leadership are keys to success, Garner says. “[Servant leadership] is the single most important thing I can do to help PepsiCo achieve its long-term goals.”She recently was the company’s senior vice president of sales at Frito-Lay, but then was tapped to assume her current position as senior vice president of Demand Accelerator at the onset of the pandemic, with responsibility for leading growth across PepsiCo’s North America food and beverages businesses – including shopper analytics and insights, shopper marketing, category leadership and space transformation.Her team of 250-plus demonstrated agility with its 2020 plans and adjusted the traditional planning process with retailer partners for 2021. One notable achievement is a data science predictive model to map all households according to viral and economic impact to provide deeper retail insights specifically across cleanliness and e-commerce expansion. She was named to Progressive Grocer’s Top Women in Grocery in 2014.

Profile: Kate Garner, Senior Vice President, Demand Accelerator NA, PepsiCo

P2PI MEMBERS

JOIN P2PI

Company