Local Business: PepsiCo’s 35th Street Warehouse
Products and Services: Business-to-business beverage sales, merchandising and distribution
Hours: 24/7 operations over three shifts
Address: 1400 W. 35th St., Chicago
Online: www.pepsico.com
If you’ve sipped on a PepsiCo beverage in the Chicago metropolitan area, it likely shipped through the McKinley Park neighborhood first.
PepsiCo’s gargantuan 35th Street warehouse is the primary distribution point for the company’s beverage portfolio for all of Chicagoland, from Skokie to Joliet, said Jennifer Belau, the unit sales director for the facility.
Last of Its Kind
Jamurai Soldier, left, and Jennifer Belau tour PepsiCo's McKinley Park neighborhood warehouse at 1400 W. 35th St., Chicago.“We’re actually one of the largest distribution centers in the PepsiCo beverages network,” she said, adding that it’s the last one of its kind in the City of Chicago for any distributor.
Locally manufactured Pepsi products are bottled, packaged and sent in large tractor-trailer trucks to McKinley Park from PepsiCo’s factory at 650 W. 51st St., in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood.
Then, PepsiCo organizes and sends its orders from the McKinley Park warehouse to all types of retailers and food service businesses throughout the metropolitan region, Belau said.
Soda Fountain Team
This includes large orders on tractor-trailers going to places like grocery stores, box trucks supplying convenience stores and small retailers, and even stocking vending machines, Belau said.
“We have an entire team that services vending machines and the fountains,” she said.
Supplying restaurants, institutions and food services businesses is “a huge part of our business here,” Belau said. “United Center is our biggest property.”
Daily Trucks
Annually, the PepsiCo warehouse sends around 16 million cases “out our docks and doors,” Belau said.
Around 15 semi tractor-trailer trucks per day arrive at the warehouse to deliver all types of PepsiCo beverages, Belau said, some of which originate from places like Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Munster, Indiana; and Urbandale, Iowa.
Around 20 larger, 50’ to 60’ trucks deliver orders daily to bigger retailers, Belau said, and about 40 side-loading trucks deliver product daily to smaller-format customers.
550 Employees
Merchandising support is a big part of their 35th Street operations, too, Belau said. “We have a team of about 100 employees who service our customers.”
Around 16 million cases of beverages ship annually from PepsiCo's 35th Street warehouse.Overall, the McKinley Park warehouse has about 550 employees who report out of the building, Belau said.
“A lot of our employees that do our frontline work — selling, merchandising, or delivery — are from the neighborhood, both the West and South sides of Chicago,” she said.
We're the Doers
At the warehouse, salespeople work as non-union employees, Belau said, but warehouse, merchandising and delivery teams are all union-affiliated.
PepsiCo’s corporate management for its regional operations resides at the Old Post Office in downtown Chicago, Belau said.
“That’s the team that supports and creates, and we’re the doers,” she said. “We execute the plan.”
People Move Product
Jamurai Soldier helps lead this effort as the facility’s warehouse supervisor for its 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. third shift.
“Although it seems like I’m managing product, which we are, I’m really managing people,” he said. “It’s people who move the product. They make everything work.”
PepsiCo's 35th Street warehouse ships a very wide range of the company's beverage products.Soldier came to PepsiCo via an internship through his business studies at the City Colleges of Chicago’s Olive-Harvey College, where he started at PepsiCo’s downtown corporate offices, but “coincidentally, there was a tour to visit the plant,” he said.
Job Versus Gig
When he saw the opportunity to interview for a manger position, he applied and got the job, he said. “It’s been everything I expected and more.”
Both Belau and Soldier pointed to contemporary challenges of attracting and nurturing a workforce in an era where gig work promises more flexibility than an employer who must meet customers’ rigid deadlines.
Belau said PepsiCo’s frontline career development program is key to nurturing talent: offering career coaching, interviewing practice and counseling to help early career employees understand what they might do, including the range of opportunities at PepsiCo.
Talent Is There
“We do a lot of development and have opportunity because we’re such a big organization,” she said.
“The talent is there,” Soldier said. “The challenge is: Can we identify the things that are going to speak to them?”
“You take care of your people, your people take care of your business,” Belau said.
Year of Transformation
Belau called 2023 the “year of transformation” for PepsiCo’s 35th Street station, with big expansions to operations, and capital investment that included skylight installation for natural light and energy savings inside the cavernous warehouse spaces.
A worker gets ready to shift cases of beverages at PepsiCo's 35th Street warehouse.For the first time ever, the 35th Street warehouse supports alcohol distribution: Third-party distributor Blue Cloud Distribution now uses the facility to help store and ship its product, which includes beverages from the Boston Beer Company portfolio.
“That created 12 jobs locally to help sustain the operation,” Belau said.
Sell and Move
Another big expansion to operations in 2023 was a change to how Gatorade is shipped to the Chicago metropolitan area. Now, all Gatorade is merchandised, picked and delivered by the 35th Street team instead of Gatorade-specific trucks.
The Gatorade expansion “resulted in investment in infrastructure, as well as additional jobs and equipment,” Belau said. “That added about 1.5 million cases [annually] to our business here.”
“There’s a lot that goes into that sell and move,” she said.
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