Update: PETA Shareholder Resolution Over Animal Abuse in PepsiCo’s Sugar Supply Chain Garners Substantial Support

For Immediate Release:
May 6, 2026

Contact:
Alex Payne 202-483-7382

Purchase, N.Y. –

In a significant shake-up of PepsiCo’s shareholder meeting today, a resolution submitted by PETA calling out the potential torture of bulls in the company’s sugar supply chain pulled a remarkable 8.8% of the vote—an unusually high number for a first-time animal welfare resolution and enough for PETA to resubmit the resolution if the company has failed to act to mechanize their haulage by next year. PETA is urging Pepsi to ensure its partners stop sourcing sugar from suppliers in India, where bulls are beaten, whipped, and forced to haul illegally overloaded sugarcane carts. Video of bulls in India forced to pull heavy loads, like those used in Pepsi’s sugar supply chain, is here.

The resolution pointed out the contradiction between PepsiCo’s animal welfare policy and struggling bulls being worked to exhaustion, injury, and even to death to haul sugar for products like Pepsi-branded beverages. PepsiCo claims that “animals deserve lives free from physical and mental suffering,” yet it has failed to take any action to stop the well-documented abuse of bulls in Maharashtra, India, where the animals are beaten with sticks and whips, stabbed by barbed-wire spikes attached to their yokes to keep them from turning their heads, yanked by ropes inserted through their fire-pierced nostrils, and forced to haul carts with up to 8,000 pounds of sugarcane.

PepsiCo previously attempted to quash the shareholder resolution, prompting a lawsuit filed by PETA Foundation attorneys. Less than a day later, the company reversed course and agreed to include the proposal on the matter in today’s meeting.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—points out that when it comes to the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a bull is a dog is a boy. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.