PepsiCo – Beverage & Growth Optimizer
Food & Beverage / CPG
Digital Products
Strategy + Transformation
Intelligent Systems
Sales Enablement
Client
PepsiCo
Timeline
Multi-Phase Enterprise Engagement
Services
Enterprise UX + Decision-Support Design
Challenge
The intelligence was sophisticated. Using it needed to be fast and intuitive.
Retail optimization involves a complicated combination of products, packages, available space, customer requirements, business rules and analytical recommendations. The people applying those recommendations understood the business deeply, but they needed to work quickly, often while evaluating an account or discussing opportunities directly with a customer.
The challenge was not to reduce the sophistication of the underlying system. It was to make that sophistication easier and more efficient to put to work.
Traditional spreadsheets, product lists and data-heavy interfaces created unnecessary friction between the recommendation and the physical environment it was meant to improve. PepsiCo needed an experience that preserved the intelligence behind the optimization engine while giving field teams a faster, more intuitive way to understand recommendations, evaluate alternatives and act on them.
The interface also needed to feel unmistakably connected to the real world: actual brands, actual packages and actual retail space, not abstract rows of data.
Strategic Insight
Don’t make people interpret the algorithm. Show them the opportunity.
The most important design decision was to separate the complexity of the underlying optimization engine from the experience of using it.
Instead of asking employees to translate rows of data into a mental picture of a store, Fluence brought the retail environment into the experience itself. Products looked like products. Packages reflected the actual portfolio. Cooler and shelf space became visual environments that could be understood and manipulated directly.
The goal was more than simplifying the work, the solution had to remove the friction from doing this sophisticated work quickly and accurately.
That shift allowed optimization recommendations to be evaluated in the same context in which PepsiCo employees and their customers naturally thought about the business. The system could retain its analytical sophistication while the experience concentrated on what mattered in the moment: understanding the opportunity, evaluating the recommendation and determining what to do next.
It also established a model that could evolve. What began as Beverage Optimizer could extend into a broader Growth Optimizer experience as PepsiCo looked beyond individual space-optimization decisions toward additional opportunities for account growth.
What We Created
A visual decision-support system connecting optimization intelligence with frontline action.
Fluence worked with PepsiCo stakeholders and implementation partners to translate a sophisticated optimization capability into an enterprise experience designed around the realities of field work.
Research, use-case analysis, prototyping and testing helped the team understand how recommendations would actually be consumed, evaluated, discussed with customers and put into action. The resulting experience replaced much of the abstraction of conventional analytical tools with a visual representation of the products and retail environments employees already understood.
Beverage Optimizer established the core model: make the intelligence accessible in context and help employees move efficiently from recommendation to action. As the opportunity evolved, Growth Optimizer extended that thinking toward a broader decision-support experience focused on identifying and acting on opportunities for growth.
Employee interviews, business use cases and collaboration with PepsiCo stakeholders helped define how optimization fit into field workflows, customer conversations and real-world retail decisions.
Products, packages and retail fixtures were represented visually rather than as abstract rows of information, helping employees evaluate recommendations in a context that resembled the environment they were optimizing.
Complex optimization workflows were translated into clear, efficient interactions designed to help field teams move from recommendation to understanding to action without exposing unnecessary system complexity.
Interactive prototypes and representative business scenarios allowed workflows, interactions and information requirements to be evaluated and refined before implementation.
The principles established through Beverage Optimizer created a foundation for a broader Growth Optimizer experience, extending decision support beyond the original space-optimization use case toward additional account-growth opportunities.
Fluence worked across business, retail, technology and implementation teams to maintain alignment between the optimization capability, the user experience and the practical requirements of enterprise deployment.
RESULTS + SIGNALS
What success looked like.
Beverage Optimizer demonstrated that analytical sophistication and ease of use don’t have to compete. By translating optimization recommendations into an intuitive visual experience, PepsiCo gave frontline employees a more practical way to understand opportunities, evaluate recommendations and bring those insights into customer conversations. Early test markets generated millions of dollars in incremental sales. Just as importantly, the underlying experience model proved extensible: the thinking established through Beverage Optimizer could evolve into Growth Optimizer and support a broader approach to frontline decision support.
MEASURABLE BUSINESS IMPACT
Early Beverage Optimizer test markets generated millions of dollars in incremental sales, connecting a better decision experience with measurable business performance.
FRONTLINE DECISION SUPPORT
Optimization recommendations became visual, contextual and easier to evaluate, helping field teams move more efficiently from analytical insight to customer conversation and retail execution.
PLATFORM EVOLUTION
The experience principles established through Beverage Optimizer provided a foundation for Growth Optimizer, extending the decision-support model toward a broader set of growth opportunities.
WHAT THIS PROVES
Digital Products
Strategy + Transformation
Intelligent Systems
Sales Enablement
Related Work
