PepsiCo and Gatik have announced a multi-year strategic partnership to bring driverless freight into PepsiCo’s North America food and beverage supply chain, marking the largest commercial autonomous freight deployment to date.
Gatik has already been operating over 40 driverless trucks for PepsiCo across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas for some time.
“Serving our vast network of customers requires a supply chain that is safe, reliable, and built for the future,” said Jim Farrell, Senior Vice President of Supply Chain, PepsiCo. “Gatik is already operating inside our networks and brings the autonomous freight technology, commercial experience, and scale we need to strengthen service, add capacity, and move products more consistently for our customers.”
Gatik’s driverless trucks are designed for end-to-end deliveries across highways and surface streets, with dynamic route orchestration capabilities built for complex regional logistics networks spanning hundreds of pickup and drop-off locations. This enables PepsiCo to modify route plans in response to daily operational needs, including adding or removing stops, responding to shifts in demand, and adapting to activity levels across distribution centers. That flexibility helps PepsiCo reduce variability, improve on-time performance, and add capacity without requiring major changes to its existing operations.
The partnership is focused on PepsiCo’s regional transportation networks, where products move daily from site to site. These networks are high-frequency, time-sensitive, and essential to keeping products flowing consistently.
“Autonomous trucking has reached commercial scale when it operates inside one of the most demanding supply chains on the planet,” said Gautam Narang, CEO and Co-Founder of Gatik. “That is what Gatik is doing with PepsiCo. Our autonomous trucks are already moving products every day across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas, and this partnership is proof that Gatik is becoming central to how the world’s largest companies move goods.”
Announcing this partnership is new, but the relationship is not: Gatik’s first deployment with PepsiCo occurred in 2022. Gatik operates with more than 98% on-time delivery across its operations today. This agreement builds on PepsiCo’s experience running one of North America’s largest private fleets and brings Gatik’s autonomous freight capabilities into real, day-to-day supply chain operations.
T or D As A Service?
In the truck autonomy space, most attention in the press has been focused on “Driver-as-a-Service,” i.e. an autonomy company acts as a supplier to a truck manufacturer (OEM) so that the OEM offers a an “autonomy inside” product. This is the approach in play for Aurora, PlusAI, Waabi, and others.
The challenge for DaaS is in creating the production partnership with an OEM. Creating such a tie-up is a grueling process, as the OEM has a lot at stake; the resulting product must be reliable, safe, and address customer needs. But, once this is in place — which can take several years — its a sweet spot for the developer if the uptake is strong.
In the DaaS model, legacy trucking companies purchase autonomous trucks from OEMs and operate freight services.
DaaS contrasts with Transport-as-a-Service, in which AV companies develop the autonomy and move the freight themselves. They purchase trucks from OEMs, in some cases within a deep partnership so that the OEM can provide an autonomy-ready vehicle with redundancy built in to make for a more robust safety case. This is the approach for Gatik, working with Isuzu. Using a different approach, Bot Auto and Kodiak purchase stock trucks and upfit them for autonomy. An outlier, Einride, builds its truck from the ground up, including autonomy capability.
TaaS allows an AV developer to come to market quickly, as well as control their destiny. They have to create scale within their own operations.
Gatik Dominates Short Haul B2B Freight Autonomy Services
Founded in 2017, Gatik’s driverless trucks are commercially deployed on public roads across multiple markets, including Texas, Arkansas, Arizona, Nebraska, and Ontario.
Gatik’s TaaS approach benefits from their deep partnership with Isuzu. Isuzu is also an investor in Gatik.
As described by Gatik, the company “develops AI-powered autonomous trucking solutions for regional logistics networks. The Gatik Driver™ is a scalable, interpretable AI system purpose-built to enable safe, consistent, and high-frequency freight movement. Proven in real-world driverless operations for Fortune 50 customers, Gatik’s technology enhances the reliability and cost efficiency of B2B supply chains at scale.”
As the platform has matured over time, Gatik has provided freight services with medium duty trucks, using safety drivers, for Kroger, Loblaws, Walmart, Georgia-Pacific, and others.
After working with Loblaws since 2020, Gatik last fall announced a new contract to deliver goods with greater frequency and responsiveness to over 300 Loblaws stores - a total of 50 trucks. The Total Contract Value for Gatik’s autonomy services under this expanded deployment with Loblaws is approximately $36M.
At the time, Gatik said the expanded fleet would initially be deployed with safety drivers onboard, before transitioning to Freight-Only (driverless) operations across Loblaws regional distribution networks in the Toronto region.
By focusing on high-frequency transportation networks within strategically defined, commercially dense areas, Gatik has developed what they call “a robust commercial solution that maximizes safety, scalability, and speed to market.”
What To Watch
Gatik currently operates 41 trucks with PepsiCo. What to watch is the pace at which PepsiCo expands autonomous operations, as well as the pace at which Loblaws operations transition from safety-drivers to “Freight-Only Vehicles,” i.e. driverless.
As well as other customer announcements!
But end-users like PepsiCo and Loblaws may have no motivation to release such information. If they have a competitive advantage in being an early-mover in truck autonomy, they’ll work quietly with Gatik as they expand.
The same is or will be true with all the other road autonomy companies.
What changes this dynamic is going public. Einride just did so this week, and I predict we’ll see at least two more IPO’s by the end of this year. Stay tuned!
Disclaimer: I am a shareholder of Gatik.