Three Asias, three different playbooks: How PepsiCo’s Anne Tse views the world’s fastest-growing snack market

When parts of China entered rolling lockdowns during the country’s zero‑COVID campaign, PepsiCo factory workers in some “bubbles” stayed on site for up to 30 days at a time to keep production running. A case could halt operations and send workers into quarantine—as happened in June 2020, when confirmed COVID infections at one of PepsiCo’s Beijing factories forced nearly 500 employees into quarantine.

Anne Tse, who helped run the company’s China operations during the country’s three years of COVID-zero,  remembers how they had to change the way they did business. 

“We had to pivot,” Tse told Fortune, “by grouping our markets not by their ‘market development’ stage, but by their ‘COVID development’ stage.” In just 12 hours, her team abandoned the traditional model that grouped Chinese cities by the maturity of their consumer markets instead mapped operations around the pandemic: which provinces were entering lockdown, at peak restrictions, or reopening.

“It was a crucible,” she remembers, “but I think about how it trained the character and muscle of our associates,” she says.

That muscle is now being tested by a new set of pressures after Tse took over PepsiCo’s Asia-Pacific Foods division in early 2025.

Her m...