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When Patrice Pluto was 25, she 
started working at the old New York Pepsi bottling plant that sprawled under the iconic red sign spelling PepsiCola. The plant is long gone, but the sign has landmark status in its site along the East River, a reminder of the gritty industrial past of the area, now home to new apartment buildings, offices, schools, film studios, art galleries, and museums.

Patrice Pluto PepsiCo Pioneer

Surprising twists and turns marked the journey from college to career success for
Patrice Pluto ’77, Director of Operations of North America Beverages at PepsiCo.

By Carol Olsen Day
Photographs by Matt Carr

As a biology major at ɫ��ɫ College, Patrice Pluto imagined her dream job would be in a white lab coat alone with her microscope in a pristine scientific setting. A much different environment—an old, dark manufacturing plant on the East River in Long Island City’s mid-century industrial neighborhood—turned out to be the crucible for self-discovery and development she never expected.

Pluto was fascinated by biology from her first science class in junior high school. Today government and business encourage students to prepare for and enter STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) careers. In the mid ’70s, schools had not yet developed curricula emphasizing STEM, especially not for young women. Most of Pluto’s classmates aspired to be doctors, dentists, and veterinarians. She wanted to be a scientist.

From the first, she knew she would go to college. Her immigrant grandfather had insisted on higher education for all of the women in the family. Growing up in Bethlehem, she had planned to go
 to a school farther away. But her mother wasn’t well, and the family wanted her close by.

Junior year was tumultuous. After a long illness, her mother died, and Pluto moved out of the dorm to be home with her father. That spring, she had a serious car accident. One of her professors suggested she enroll in an urban semester work-study program in Harrisburg in the fall. There, Pluto was assigned a job classifying aquatic insect larvae and was able to test out her vision of working in a lab.

After graduation, she answered a help-wanted ad and applied for a job at the huge Lehigh Valley plant of Kraft Foods (now Mondelez International). When Kraft read her application, they decided to offer her a higher position as a food technologist, a job requiring a solid science background.

“I can do this,” she thought. “This is it, my opportunity.”

Intro to Manufacturing

For the first time, Pluto was immersed in a manufacturing environment. The Kraft plant was the company’s second-largest domestic production facility, employing about 1,200 men and women, manufacturing and distributing 249 types of cheese, plus margarine, steak sauce, mayonnaise, and salad dressing.

“I thought I was the luckiest person because I got to work in the cheese plant,” she says.

Pluto was impressed by the many moving parts of the operation,
 by the focused activity and all the workers. She supervised the quality control process, checking equipment settings, taking samples for testing, and responding to any issues that arose. She discovered she loved being a part of the interaction of people with different skills working together. She also found she was good at listening and communicating.

“My final role as manufacturing supervisor of the cheese processing department was the coolest,” she recalls. “It was a heavy labor area, and I supervised the men who, with the aid of grinders, a monorail system, and massive blenders, transformed 500-pound blocks of cheese into 15,000-pound batches for packaging.”

Pluto made it a practice to sit at lunch with the workers, getting to know them. Her management style developed organically, she says. She still remembers when one worker revealed to her that he had been fired during the aftermath of a strike and then brought back; and when an older woman who had bid on and won a difficult sanitation job was grateful when Pluto congratulated her.

“If you treat people with respect,” Pluto says, “it creates a healthier work environment.”

Pluto’s goal had always been to live and work in New York. Following four years at Kraft, and having lost her father a year after her mom died, the 25-year-old was ready to make the move. In 1981, she applied for a manufacturing supervisor job at PepsiCo, in Long Island City, Queens, across the East River from Manhattan.

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“What makes workers happy,” Pluto says, “is what makes us all happy: a safe environment, respect, knowing that your job means something, and the positive impact of everyone on each other.”

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The Pepsi Challenge

The day of her job interview at PepsiCo started at 10 a.m. and ended late in the evening. The company wanted her to know what to expect—especially what it would be like to be the only woman in a workspace and the first woman supervisor of men likely to be hostile to a woman encroaching on their set ways and territory.

“The interviewers were very honest with me,” Pluto remembers, “almost too honest.” Human resources staff, department managers and supervisors, and the plant manager told her about difficult employees and conflicts with management. If she took the job, she would become the first woman manufacturing supervisor ever in a Pepsi beverage plant. They didn’t know how the men would treat her, and they admitted they couldn’t actually guarantee her safety. They drove her to New Jersey to meet another plant manager and the division manufacturing and human resources directors. Back in New York, she was surprised to find the plant and warehouse managers waiting to ask her to go to dinner with them. She could tell they wanted her to take the job. The intense daylong interview had become an offer. She said yes.

“My first day, I walked down the hallway to the sound of catcalls. I had made the mistake of wearing a dress. When my supervisor introduced me around, a few of the men made derogatory remarks,” Pluto says. “I wondered, what did I get myself into?”

There was no women’s uniform and no women’s locker room. PepsiCo gave Pluto the same outfit as the men: a man’s tucked-in white shirt, blue pants, a hard hat, shoes that would withstand the slippery wet floors, and Channellock pliers with long plastic handles. Her car had been stolen the previous day, so she rode the subway to work at 6:30 a.m. dressed like a man, hardhat in hand and pliers protruding from her back pocket.

Sadly, Pluto’s sister died that first week at PepsiCo. It was a hard week. “I’ve got to make this job work,” she thought.

A Throwback to Another Era

“Pornography was commonplace on the production floor,” Pluto says. “I’d be talking to the line person and there would be an explicitly lewd photograph behind his head, right in my view.”

Today, none of this behavior would be permitted, but Pluto was determined not to complain. She told herself she was lucky the men had stopped the catcalls and whistles once they realized she was there to stay.

For her first three months at PepsiCo, few men on the plant floor spoke to her. “I got used to the environment,” she says. “I got used to the porn. But the dead silence really got to me. I tried to sit at lunch with the men, but no one would talk and the mood was tense, so I eventually sat alone.”

Then, a union foreman announced to a large group of warehouse workers, “You guys are funny. You take obscenities and curse words out of your vocabularies and you have nothing to say.” This was the moment when the thaw began. Pluto realized that the silence was not negative. The men hadn’t wanted to be disrespectful by cursing in her presence.

Her supervisors coached her to take a tougher approach with the men. But Pluto wasn’t going to change who she was. She knew that the only way was to be herself—direct but respectful and polite; asking, not demanding; setting clear expectations and holding everyone to them.

The men didn’t understand why she was there. Some felt sorry for her. An older gentleman privately told her that his son could get her a nice job at Rockefeller Center. Some became protective. A union foreman yelled to a supervisor who was cursing in conversation with Pluto: “Don’t you ever use that language again in front of Patrice.” Their concern extended to her safety on the subway. “Late at night, they would make guys drive me home. I couldn’t say no,” she says.

Finally, she says, “One of the meanest, most disrespectful mechanics, who never talked to the supervisors, approached me and let me know of a quality control issue he felt was important.” That was when she knew she was going to make it.

Over time, she had come to feel at home in the plant. Her work
 was as rewarding for her as it was transformative for the plant. 
“My presence alone helped foster a workplace that was more respectful and inclusive,” she says.

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Patrice Pluto and her wife, Jane Lindner, met at a Pepsi plant in New Jersey and have been together for 25 years.
They married in 2013 when the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage provided national acknowledgement of their marriage.

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On the Road

When PepsiCo sold the New York City business, Pluto moved to a New Jersey plant, first as quality assurance manager and then as production manager. She had come a long way, but coming out as a lesbian at work was still years ahead. “It wasn’t the right time or place,” she realized.

Pluto spent the next 12 years at Pepsi in tech support, traveling to plants to perform safety audits and help improve operations and quality. Representing PepsiCo, she made sure the independently owned plants were performing at peak levels. She traveled to facilities in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia. “At one point,” she says, “I had 13 plants to oversee in Pennsylvania alone.”

No matter where she went, she encountered few women. At one plant, a woman in the office kept a padlock on the bathroom door when she wasn’t there so the men wouldn’t use it—which meant that Pluto was also locked out.

In 1997, she began training some plants in new techniques. The company had added juices and bottled water, and Pluto helped interpret PepsiCo needs and new plans to workers who had been producing and bottling only soda.

Director of Operations

PepsiCo promoted Pluto to the corporate level in 1998.

A lot was changing. New ingredients, supply chains and logistics, even more products, and packaging innovations introduced new challenges. Pluto was focused on supporting PepsiCo’s growth, collaborating on innovation teams that did product and packaging development, extensive R&D, long-term ingredient research and planning, marketing, and sales.

At ɫ��ɫ, Pluto focused on biology, but she also credits the college’s program of liberal arts requirements for her strengths. “Personally, ɫ��ɫ sparked my passion for art and expanded my interests in literature, sociology, and psychology,” she says. “And professionally, I don’t believe I’d be where I am today without a liberal arts foundation. My communications skills and intellectual curiosity across disciplines, along with critical thinking honed in my college years, are at least as important in my work as pure scientific knowledge and methods.”

Today Pluto supports the 37 plants owned by independent franchises, supplying about 25 percent of the US volume. She also directs the corporation’s operations communications to all domestic plants.

“I’m chained to my desk now,” she jokes. “I get to the plants only once in a while. But my mind is always focused on the manufacturing taking place there.”

The atmosphere that had led to her uncertainty about coming out at work eventually began to change. As she wrote in the Huffington Post in 2013, “Despite my continued career successes and accomplishments, 15 years passed before I was ready to come out as a lesbian at work. We all have our own path.”

In 2004, PepsiCo already had formal policies on diversity and inclusion for women, employees with disabilities, seniors, religious people, and the LGBTQ community, but it saw an opportunity to improve the culture. Pluto helped advance this initiative by cofounding the East Coast chapter of EQUAL, PepsiCo’s LGBT & Allies employee resource group.

“Coming out was a catalyst for me to grow personally and professionally,” she says.

PepsiCo has honored Pluto with five Chairman’s awards—four for her work with teams achieving business goals and one, the Harvey 
C. Russell Inclusion Award, for individual merit. Created in 2003 to reflect the achievements of the company’s first African American VP, the Russell award recognizes those who have contributed significantly to diversity and inclusion. She is especially proud of this honor.

Pluto’s determination to overcome the challenges of her first job in the old New York plant helped her find within herself the qualities of leadership that she never imagined as a college student dreaming of a far different life. The seeming obstacles became the agents of change, helping Pluto express her true self and PepsiCo become a leader in workplace environment.

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