10/29/2023 0 Comments Pepsi 1985![]() The first factory opened in the Black Sea port of Novorossiyik two years later. So PepsiCo agreed to take part in a barter agreement under which it was given a monopoly to import and sell Soviet-made Stolichnaya vodka in the US. The rouble was, at the time, worthless outside the Soviet Union. The upshot was that, in 1972, PepsiCo and the Soviet government signed an agreement under which the company would build 10 plants in the Soviet Union, including sites in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. He kept up communications with Alexei Kosygin, who in 1964 had succeeded Khrushchev as chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, taking him on a tour of Pepsi's plants in the US. Unfortunately for both, events intervened, with US-Soviet relations deteriorating during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis which, ultimately, cost Khrushchev his position.īut Mr Kendall never gave up hope of tapping this huge market. Image: Pepsi enjoyed a monopoly in the Soviet Union until 1985 Mr Kendall recalled to the New York Times in 1999: "I went to Nixon the night before, at the embassy, and told him I was in a lot of trouble at home because people thought I was wasting Pepsi's money coming to a communist country. ![]() Leading the push and being hosted by the then Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was the then vice president, Richard Nixon, an old friend of Mr Kendall. Mr Kendall was there as director of Pepsi's international operations. ![]() It all started on 24 July 1959 at an American National Exhibition at Moscow's Sokolniki Park that had been organised at the behest of the then president, Dwight Eisenhower, to showcase the attraction of American products. The story of how Pepsi penetrated the Iron Curtain is fascinating and a tribute to the tenacity of Donald Kendall, a former bomber pilot in the US Navy, whose career at the company took him from a production line on a bottling plant just outside New York, and later driving a delivery truck, all the way to the boardroom. Of these, perhaps the most symbolic of these is PepsiCo, for it was the very first Western brand to be produced and sold in the old Soviet Union. Image: McDonalds is also shutting up shop in Russia Pic: AP
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