‘In so many ways, I broke so many barriers:’ Former Pepsi boss Indra Nooyi on life as a trailblazing CEO

Raised in India, and the CEO of PepsiCo for over a decade, Indra Nooyi has had a lasting impact on the business world.

Turning a food giant like PepsiCo — whose portfolio includes Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, Gatorade and Mountain Dew — away from fat, sugar and salt might sound like a recipe for disaster. And yet that is exactly what Indra Nooyi did when she was the company’s CEO, from 2006 to 2018. During her tenure, net revenue grew more than 80%. “In the life of a CEO, every day is a challenge,” she tells CNN in her office in Greenwich, Connecticut. “Boards pick CEOs because they’re resilient, they can actually find a way through all of these challenges and transform the company. And that’s what I had to do. I had to make sure our portfolio was shifting to a good blend of ‘treat for you’ products, ‘fun for you’ products, and then add the ‘better for you’ and ‘good for you’ products. “I had to reduce the environmental footprint. I had to make sure people felt charged and excited to come to work for PepsiCo while delivering performance. That was the single biggest challenge.” Nooyi was born in Madras (today Chennai), India, and emigrated to the United States in 1978 to study at the Yale School of Management, where she also worked as a receptionist to sustain herself. She joined Pepsi in 1994, aged 39, and served as its president and chief financial officer before becoming CEO — a role that made her the first woman of color and first immigrant to lead a Fortune 50 company. “I just looked at the assignment and said, Oh my God, I better do right by women, by people of color, by immigrants, by people of Indian origin,” she says. “I wanted to do right by everybody, but most importantly, I wanted to make sure I was a good steward of PepsiCo. And so at that point, I didn’t think of the historic role that I was playing.