PepsiCo spends about three million dollars annually to lobby the federal government. Let’s just say they are not lobbying the federal government for help to make their products healthier. What they are trying to do is ensure that any proposed childhood obesity legislation would be in the industry’s favor. They are also very concerned about any rules that would affect the way food is marketed to children. It’s not just PepsiCo but a whole cabal which includes media leviathans like Viacom.

When I think of the amount of sugar or high fructose corn syrup that they put into soft drinks it makes me wish someone did a documentary on this topic. Call it Soda Nation or something. Anyhow, this does make me think about getting a SodaStream device.

Note – I’m not selling or shilling for this soda-making device by any means, but I figure I might as well put my Amazon Associate’s ID in there! People seem to be happy with it from the reviews though.

I wonder where Mubarak is getting all that money to pay the thugs he sent out into the street?

Pro-Mubarak thugs charged into Tahrir Square on horses and camels in an effort to save the embattled Egyptian dictator. It was not long ago that the regime was being propped up by a different breed of supporter: foreign investors arriving on corporate jets with billions of dollars in capital.

The guilty mentioned are BP, Nestle, Procter and Gamble, Electrolux, Saint-Gobain and PepsiCo.

The appeal of Egypt for foreign investors is not just better access to a market of 80 million consumers. As in China, a repressive political environment has weakened the power of labor and kept down wages to the advantage of major employers, both foreign and domestic.

Corporate Accountability International is keeping tabs on Pepsi.

If Pepsi is going to make marketing claims about how “pure,” “perfect,” and “purified” Aquafina is, the least it can do is verify as much – providing the public with the same type of reports every one of us can get from our local public water system.

Tell Pepsi to do what they say.

The Wisconsin men said they talked with the distributors in 1981 about their idea to bottle and sell purified water and that PepsiCo later stole the idea by creating Aquafina.

via PepsiCo learns a $1.26 billion lesson over misplaced letter | U.S. | Reuters.

There is no shame when it comes to a corporaiton. They are by definition sociopaths. Now they have to pay two men $.1.26 billion (I say it in the style of Dr.Evil) dollars.

Restaurants are shunning bottled water for tap water. How long before we see this trend spread?

The Italian restaurant backed by celebrities Mario Batali and Joseph Bastianich is one of several shunning bottled water, along with the city of San Francisco and New York state.

"The argument for local water is compelling and obvious," said Bastianich, who is phasing out bottled water across his restaurant empire, which stretches to Los Angeles.

"It's about transportation, packaging, the absurdity of moving water all over the world," he said.

Posted via email from Jason’s posterous

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Pepsi has rolled out this campaign of “Refresh Everything” to try and target Generation Y (and I guess some X’ers as well). I’ve said this before but it is a blatant attempt at tapping into the enthusiasm of the Obama campaign (they’re even using “yes we can”) and it is wrong (Ikea also has ads like this too). The beverage of choice for what is shaping up to be the civic/socially conscious generation is nothing. I don’t feel hope, change or anything when I drink a beverage. I refuse to be marketed to in this manner. I refuse to upload a video to their “Refresh Everything” video wall. If I’m going to upload a video there are dozen of more suitable websites to do so. Futhermore, with a record like Pepsico, Inc. they are hardly the corporation to be repsresenting any generation especially the millennials. Their aim is to attract people to their brand which in turn should help them sell more beverages. I’d say that you should not buy into this garbage and drink what you want because you really want to.

In an exercise in what must be the most brazen marketing and branding effort yet Pepsi is trying to pull at the heart-strings of the millions of people who voted in the 2008 elections for hope and change. Tying marketing, politics and civic enagement together in a sickening way, they are asking people to upload videos in an open letter to President-Elect Obama through a website called Refresh Everything. The first thing I noticed even before the video wall was the image of the Pepsi logo.

Tied into this video sharing website are links to “I want to serve Pepsi” and “join Pepsi”.  All I can think of is that they must have been reading the articles saying that Generation Y is very civic minded more so than the generation before them. Therefore, they might be trying to reach them this way. At the moment there doesn’t appear to be any other videos on the wall besides ones that have a slick production quality to them.