PepsiCo Digital Twin Project with Siemens Provides a Blueprint for Successful Digital Twin Ventures

Siemens and PepsiCo announced at CES 2026 a collaboration that aims to digitally transform manufacturing and warehouse facilities across the United States. The project leverages Siemens Digital Twin Composer and uses NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to generate photorealistic virtual plants and models. Using these models, Siemens and PepsiCo simulated and optimized plant layouts and manufacturing processes. As a result, 90% of potential issues were identified before any physical modifications occurred, throughput on initial deployment increased 20%, and Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) reduced 10% to 15%. Importantly, the digitalization, simulation, and optimization steps of this project were accomplished in a matter of weeks, demonstrating the speed at which digital twin technology can improve manufacturing and warehousing processes.

Conversations about digital twins can sound unclear and overly ambitious, largely because digital twins are not solutions bought out-of-the-box. Instead, they represent a confluence of information from multiple software platforms, suppliers, data streams, and analytics layers, including Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), simulation, product design, and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MESs). The lack of tangibility obscures the potential of digital twin technology. As a result, 83% of manufacturers feel they lack the expertise to fully grasp the potential of new technologies like immersive technology, industrial metaverses, and digital twins (see ABI Research’s Industrial and Manufacturing Survey 2H 2024/1Q 2025: State of Play for Digital Transformation).

To be clear, PepsiCo does not yet have a live, closed-loop digital twin of its factories. The phase highlighted at CES aimed to model, simulate, and optimize plant operations to improve efficiency, rather than equip every machine to continuously feed data into a digital representation of the factories. However, developing a plant-wide simulation model is a crucial step toward building live, continuous, closed-loop digital twins. Siemens and PepsiCo demonstrating tangible results from this process by using Digital Twin Composer grounds the digital twin value proposition in proven results.

Siemens and PepsiCo’s collaboration provides a compelling framework for a successful endeavor into digital twins and industrial metaverse technology. The success of this project boils down to accomplishments in three areas: time, baseline, and scale.

Completing the plant models, simulations, and optimizations in a matter of weeks, Siemens conveys a rapid time-to-value of digital twin projects. Time is a central concern for manufacturers exploring in-depth digital transformation projects, and digital twin suppliers looking to implement similar projects must demonstrate a clear and competitive timeline that produces tangible results in weeks.

The second takeaway is the importance of a robust retrofitting process to apply digital twin technology in brownfield sites. The baseline of the PepsiCo project consisted of legacy sites with disconnected systems. A viable digital twin tool must be flexible in its deployment, able to model and simulate plant facilities regardless of legacy status, and provide confidence to customers that brownfield infrastructure will not impede the success of digital twin projects.

Finally, piloting a digital twin project with three plants allows Siemens to demonstrate value and scale once the value is proven. Competitors must follow a similar framework, working closely with manufacturers to ensure that digital twin tools are effective and efficient before attempting to deploy at scale. This approach proves the value of the technology early, while allowing manufacturers to dictate their commitment levels consistently.