How to become a PepsiCo (Pepsi) distributor

Who appoints Pepsi distributors

Drinks: Varun Beverages. VBL is PepsiCo’s franchise bottler. It makes, sells and distributes Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Sting, 7UP, Mirinda, Slice and Aquafina in its licensed territories, and says it accounts for more than 90% of PepsiCo’s beverage sales volume in India.² PepsiCo and VBL revised their exclusive bottling agreement for India on 21 May 2026 and extended it to 30 April 2049.⁴ VBL also sells and distributes Tropicana juices, Gatorade and Quaker value-added dairy in territories across North and East India.⁵

• One step: VBL to you. “VBL does not appoint any “Super Stockist”.”¹ All of VBL’s India sales go to primary dealers and distributors, who serve retailers, modern trade, hotels and restaurants.²
• How many. VBL sold to 2,353 primary dealers and distributors in 2025 (2,275 in 2024); the top 10 took 17.3% of those sales.²
• Depots. VBL runs distribution centres and depots across its licensed territories.²
• Shops. In May 2026 VBL’s chairman put its outlet base at “about 4 million” (about 40 lakh) and said it hoped to add close to 5 lakh outlets.³

VBL is more than 90% of PepsiCo’s drinks volume, not all of it,² so some areas may be served by another bottler. We could not verify which.

Snacks: PepsiCo India. Lay’s, Kurkure and the other snacks are PepsiCo India’s own business, separate from VBL: about 80% of PepsiCo India’s revenue in 2023 came from food, with beverages handled by VBL, Business Standard (PTI) reported.⁶ We could not check how PepsiCo India appoints snack distributors because its website, pepsicoindia.co.in, blocked our access, so this article covers only drinks through VBL.

How to apply: what VBL publishes

1. 1

   Know what VBL says it does not do

   VBL’s public notice: “VBL would like to inform public at large that it does not operate any website, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and/or social media platforms for offering distributorship nor has any process of online appointment of any distributor or supplier.”¹ There is no online application.

2. 2

   The contacts VBL does publish

   The contact form on varunbeverages.com/contact-us has one choice, “Choose Your Profile”: Individual, Company, Media, Candidate, Student or Other. There is no distributor option. The corporate office is at Plot No. 31, Institutional Area, Sector-44, Gurgaon 122002, Haryana; phone +91-124-4643100 and +91-124-4642203.¹

3. 3

   Approach VBL offline, with the facts of your business

   Our suggestion, since VBL appoints only offline and publishes no format: ask the shops and the Pepsi distributor in your area which VBL depot supplies them, and write to VBL there or at the Gurgaon office. Give your town and the areas you can cover, the brands you carry now, your godown address and size, your vehicles, your GSTIN and FSSAI licence number, and how many shops you supply. A genuine reply comes only from an @rjcorp.in or @varunbeverages.com address.¹

What you need before you apply

No company in this series publishes a full document list. These are the registrations the law itself asks of a distributor, from the government’s own pages:

FSSAI rules a distributor must follow

• Buy and sell food only from and to FSSAI licensed or registered businesses, and keep the records. (FSSAI licence conditions)
• Give a warranty in Form E on your bill or cash memo when you sell food to a shop.
• Licences and registrations issued from 1 April 2026 do not expire; the fee is still yearly, and you may pay several years at once. (FSSAI FAQ, 27 Mar 2026)
• On the application, tick every kind of business that applies: Distributor/Supplier, Wholesale Trade, Storage/Warehouse/Cold Storage.
• Fees: the last published table is ₹100 a year for registration and ₹2,000 for a State licence for traders. FSSAI said in March 2026 that fees were reduced, so check the amount on FoSCoS when you apply.

Money: what VBL has said

• No online payment for an appointment. “VBL does not demand any online advance payments for any appointments, be it distributorship or supplier or any other appointment.”¹
• Credit. VBL’s accounts say customer credit “generally falls in the range of 0 to 120 days”.² That covers all its customers; the terms for a distributor are not published.
• Advance payments. VBL’s standalone accounts show about ₹112.5 crore received in advance from customers on 31 Dec 2025 (about ₹141.7 crore a year earlier), so part of its trade pays ahead.²
• Coolers, bottles and vehicles. In January-June 2026 VBL spent about ₹400 crore on “market infrastructure”: visi-coolers, glass bottles, pallets and vehicles.⁴ It does not publish whether a distributor pays any deposit for these.
• Margins. VBL does not publish them. Business Standard reported in October 2024 that established soft-drink companies give distributors 3.5-5%, while Reliance’s Campa was offering 6-8%.⁷ Those are industry figures, not VBL’s.

Fake “Pepsi distributorship” offers

The common patterns of these frauds are in our main guide.

Once you are appointed: what the work looks like

• You buy from VBL directly. All of VBL’s India sales go to primary dealers and distributors.²
• Visi-coolers are VBL’s call. VBL has “close to a million plus” visi-coolers in the market, and its chairman said in May 2026: “We do not give visi-coolers to everyone.”³ VBL places vending machines and visi-coolers in high-demand locations.²
• Bottles, crates and pallets. VBL counts glass bottles, pallets and vehicles as market infrastructure⁴ and makes its own plastic crates at some plants.²
• Electric delivery vehicles. VBL says it is building a fleet of 2,100 electric vehicles together with its distributors.²
• Price fights. VBL’s chairman said in May 2026 that ₹10 packs are used only selectively, “to make sure our distributors remain with us”.³
• Distributor software. We found no published detail of the ordering or billing software VBL’s distributors use.

Questions people ask