Nature has a significant impact on food and beverages sector. Because of the geographical location of Turkey, agricultural sector affected severely. Increasing frequency and impacts of natural disasters, decreasing water resources, shrinking agricultural areas and increasing waste problem give great responsibilities to all individuals as well as private enterprises and public. In addition, agricultural activities create significant pressure on natural resources. For example, agriculture uses 70% of the world's freshwater resources. When we do agriculture in a wild way without considering the protection of the soil, we are faced with the degradation of the land and we lose the agricultural areas.
Environment sustainability has a key role for the sustainability of our business. Our goal of using sustainable resources is precisely because of this problem. Being aware of this responsibility, we place our sustainability vision at the center of our business structure. In this way, we conduct environmental sustainability projects that cover our entire value chain, not just production processes.
Thanks to our strong agricultural organization in Turkey, we are developing example projects for other PepsiCo countries about agricultural sustainability. These can be classified under three main topics: Agricultural technology, localization in agriculture and circular economy.
Usage of technology in agriculture is highly critical for efficient resource utilization. In high water-risk areas like Turkey, methods such as drip irrigation, mini sprinkler method has a significant importance.
- We encourage our farmers to use these technologies. Alongside the Agro Academy, a wide range of training programs for once every year, we regularly make field trips to ensure that our farmers produce most efficiently with minimal resource usage.
- Developed jointly with the University of Cambridge “i-Crop” is another technology which can perform irrigation optimization by taking moisture information through probes placed in the fields, contains as well as an early warning system and meteorological data. Thanks to i-Crop, we have achieved 5% to 10% water efficiency in tested areas in Turkey
Localization is one of the focus areas.
- We have been working for a long time to produce potato seeds locally. Because we demand high standards in elite seed. Due to the difficulties in finding elite potato seeds that meet these conditions from Europe, we started business partnerships with local companies to develop elite potato seeds.
- While we imported the potato seeds of elite level in 2012, today we can provide 60% of them through domestic production. Our goal is to meet all our elite seed needs with domestic production in 2022.
Circular economy is another key point for our sustainable agriculture goals. With Naturalis, our registered organo-mineral fertilizer developed by PepsiCo Turkey, first we convert organic wastes from our food factories into methane gas and use it as electricity and heat energy. Then we enrich the remaining wastes as minerals and convert them into organo-mineral fertilizer and use them in our potato croplands.