Gatik's Driverless Trucks Go Deep Into PepsiCo

A multi-year deal puts autonomous middle-mile freight at the heart of one of North America's largest food and beverage supply chains.

By The Robotics Desk

PepsiCo has signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Gatik AI Inc. to bring autonomous freight into its North American food and beverage supply chain — extending operations already running daily across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas. [1]

Gatik's autonomous trucks are built for middle-mile work: end-to-end deliveries across highways and surface streets, with dynamic route-orchestration spanning hundreds of pickup and drop-off locations. [1] That flexibility lets PepsiCo add or remove stops and respond to demand shifts without overhauling its existing distribution infrastructure. [1]

The numbers behind the partnership are concrete. Gatik's first deployment with PepsiCo dates to 2022, and the company now reports more than 98% on-time delivery across its operations. [1] A 26,000-pound box truck loaded with Doritos and Frito-Lay chips already rolls out of a distribution center, bound for a Walmart store about 4 miles away — no one at the wheel. [2]

The deal also signals where Gatik is headed commercially. The company has booked contracts with retailers worth at least $600 million for its automated fleet, and plans to scale from fewer than a dozen driverless units to hundreds of box trucks by the end of the year. [2] Both partners say the focus is on high-demand regional networks that are hard to staff and critical to keeping shelves stocked. [1]

Middle-mile logistics has long been the unglamorous bottleneck of physical retail — repetitive, time-sensitive, and resistant to easy fixes. Autonomous freight doesn't solve every constraint, but it does make that stretch of the supply chain legible to software for the first time.

For Gatik, embedding inside one of the world's largest consumer goods operations is the clearest proof yet that autonomous trucking has moved past the pilot phase. [1]