Donald M. Kendall, a former soda salesman who as the top of Pepsi challenged Coke in a worldwide cola struggle and personally promoted his model as the primary American client product made and marketed within the Soviet Union, died on Saturday at his residence in Greenwich, Conn. He was 99.
His household introduced his loss of life in a statement.
Raised on a Washington State dairy farm and by no means finishing a university diploma, Mr. Kendall spent 44 years with Pepsi, starting as a bottling plant employee in New Rochelle, N.Y., after which a fountain syrup salesman in Atlantic Metropolis. Prematurely grey since highschool, he by no means discovered youth to be a handicap in rising swiftly by the corporate’s ranks.
He was named vp of nationwide gross sales at 31, then, starting in 1957, headed the corporate’s worldwide division, doubling the variety of international locations through which the model was bought by the point he left that put up in 1963 to grow to be Pepsi-Cola’s president and chief government at 42. He served as chairman for twenty years, till 1991, 5 years after he had retired as chief government at 65.
Throughout his tenure he launched an audacious promoting marketing campaign known as “the Pepsi challenge” — blind style assessments suggesting that Coca-Cola aficionados really favored the flavour of Pepsi. When Coca-Cola’s reformulated “New Coke” was tepidly obtained by customers in 1985, he capitalized on his rival’s disappointment by selling Pepsi much more. He gambled that buyers would take to Weight loss plan Pepsi whereas Coke was extra tentatively advertising its sugar-free system as Tab. He sought to woo “the Pepsi Technology” by spending a fortune on a Michael Jackson promoting blitz. And he purchased 7Up, in 1986.
Mr. Kendall expanded Pepsi into meals manufacturing by merging it with Frito-Lay in 1965 below the identify PepsiCo and buying quick meals chains like Kentucky Fried Hen, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. (PepsiCo later shed these properties.) Below his watch, the corporate’s annual income grew to $7.6 billion from $200 million.
In a press release, Ramon Laguarta, the present chairman and chief government, known as Mr. Kendall “the architect of the PepsiCo household.”
As a politically-astute chief government of a world company, Mr. Kendall cultivated a detailed private {and professional} relationship with Richard M. Nixon, who early on represented Pepsi as a lawyer and in 1965 performed the piano at Mr. Kendall’s second marriage ceremony, on the Pierre resort in Manhattan.
The Nixon connection produced two foreign-policy coups.
In 1959, Mr. Kendall was searching for to open a Pepsi plant within the Soviet Union and noticed a chance at an exhibition of American merchandise being held in Moscow that yr (the identical exhibition the place Vice President Richard M. Nixon carried out his celebrated “kitchen debate” with the Soviet chief Nikita S. Khrushchev).
At Mr. Kendall’s request, Nixon steered Khrushchev to the Pepsi show.
“I went to Nixon the night time earlier than, on the embassy, and instructed him I used to be in plenty of hassle at residence as a result of folks thought I used to be losing Pepsi’s cash coming to a Communist nation,” Mr. Kendall instructed The New York Times in 1999. “I instructed him that someway, I needed to get a Pepsi in Khrushchev’s hand.”
He succeeded. Mr. Kendall poured Pepsi right into a paper cup for the premier, who promptly declared the beverage “very refreshing.”
“Cola Captivates Soviet Leaders,” The New York Instances headline proclaimed.
A producing settlement was lastly signed in 1973 after each events overcame foreign money alternate issues: PepsiCo accepted Soviet-made Stolichnaya vodka as fee as a substitute of rubles.
Because the Soviet Union was collapsing within the late 1980s, PepsiCo struck one other deal: It will get to open two-dozen crops behind the corroding Iron Curtain by agreeing to purchase 17 Russian submarines and three surplus warships for scrap.
“We’re disarming the Soviet Union sooner than you might be,” Mr. Kendall remarked to Brent Scowcroft, President George H.W. Bush’s nationwide safety adviser, in keeping with The Times.
In keeping with authorities paperwork and the 2007 ebook “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.,” by Tim Weiner, a former Instances reporter, in 1970 Mr. Kendall launched Nixon to a Chilean media magnate and Pepsi bottling-plant proprietor who was searching for Washington’s assist in overthowing President Salvador Allende, who had been democratically elected in Chile on a Marxist platform. Mr. Allende was deposed in 1973 by the navy and changed by the dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Donald McIntosh Kendall was born on March 16, 1921, on a dairy farm in Sequim (pronounced squim), Wash., to Carroll and Charlotte Kendall.
He enrolled in Western Kentucky State Academics Faculty (now Western Kentucky College) in Bowling Inexperienced on a soccer scholarship however left to enlist within the Navy as a bomber pilot throughout World Struggle II. He was shot down close to the Philippines, awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and joined Pepsi-Cola after returning residence in 1947.
His first marriage, to Anne McDonell, led to divorce. In 1965 he married Sigrid Rüdt von Collenberg, who is named Bim, a German baroness. Along with her, he’s survived by their two youngsters, Kent and Donald Kendall Jr.; two youngsters from his first marriage, Edward and Donna Kendall; and 10 grandchildren.
Throughout his eventful tenure with PepsiCo, Mr. Kendall opened China to the corporate’s merchandise and in 1970 moved its headquarters from New York Metropolis to a sprawling campus in suburban Buy, N.Y., designed by Edward Durell Stone. Its hallmark is a public backyard dotted with works by famend 20th-century sculptors.
Outdoors the corporate, Mr. Kendall promoted worldwide commerce as chairman of the US Chamber of Commerce and different enterprise teams and, as chairman of the American Ballet Theater Basis, recruited Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1980 to be its creative director.
Mr. Kendall was an early champion of range. In 1962, Pepsi appointed Harvey C. Russell Jr. as the primary Black vp of a serious United States company, prompting a boycott of Pepsi merchandise by the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Kendall countered by naming one other Black company government.
Above all he was an organization patriot. He painted his residence mailbox in Pepsi colours, downed a Pepsi for breakfast and, whereas choking on the phrase C-o-k-e, thrived on the company rivalry.
“They introduced out one of the best in us,” he as soon as mentioned. “If there wasn’t a Coca-Cola, we’d have needed to invent one, and they’d have needed to invent Pepsi.”
