PepsiCo has signed letters of intent with five startups from its Greenhouse Accelerator in Asia Pacific, including Australian businesses Adiona and X-Centric Sciences.
The agreements outline plans to explore whether the startups' sustainability-focused tools could be deployed more widely across the region.
The five companies are returning participants in PepsiCo's 2026 IMPACT Edition, a seven-month programme that paired founders with internal teams across sustainability, supply chain, procurement, research and development, operations, finance and legal. The group comprises Adiona, Bali Waste Cycle, Beijing AIForce Tech, Takachar and X-Centric Sciences.
The work focused on moving beyond early pilots and testing whether each startup's technology could meet operational and commercial requirements. The letters of intent do not commit either side to deployment, but they indicate discussions will continue.
For Adiona, the focus is logistics in China. The Australian company and PepsiCo agreed to explore network and logistics optimisation, including carrier procurement and network planning.
Adiona's modelling of PepsiCo's planned Songjiang network indicated the potential to cut driver duty hours by as much as 12.1% and reduce distance travelled, along with associated modelled emissions, by up to 2.3% through shorter customer-dock times. These figures are modelled results rather than realised savings.
X-Centric Sciences is working on agricultural inputs in Australia. After field trials with PepsiCo's agriculture team, the two sides signed a letter of intent to examine precision soil intelligence.
8% reduction in fertiliser use by reallocating inputs from higher-nutrient areas to nutrient-deficient zones, rather than applying a standard blanket treatment. The issue has gained greater significance as disruption to fertiliser trade routes has raised concern over global supplies.
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