PEPSICO Enabling People with Disabilities

United Spinal is partnering with PepsiCo to create a model corporate culture for people with disabilities.

By Dominic Marinelli

During the past year, United Spinal Association has worked with the PepsiCo family, which includes Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Quaker Oats, Gatorade and Tropicana, to improve employment opportunities and accessibility for people with disabilities inside the company.

The initiative began during the fall of 2005 when the leadership of PepsiCo invited United Spinal to participate in a day-long meeting focusing on the varying abilities of employees and customers. Throughout the day, staff members from United Spinal discussed issues impacting people with disabilities with PepsiCo management.

“We were specifically asked if we could do site assessments and think ‘outside the box,’” Kleo King, United Spinal’s associate executive director for Accessibility Services said. “The answer was a resounding ‘yes!’”

Principles of Accessibility

United Spinal began to work with PepsiCo’s Enable Network on identifying ways to better accommodate an employee with a disability who may work in one of the many different types of employment areas offered by PepsiCo.

The goal of the Enable Network is to provide guidance that ensures the inclusion of people with different abilities in all aspects of PepsiCo’s business and culture, including employees, consumers, partners and suppliers. In addition, the Enable Network advocates externally by leading through example.

“Our Enable Network also focuses on enabling people with different abilities to fully demonstrate their capabilities by eliminating or reducing physical and cultural job barriers across our company and by expanding recruitment and professional development opportunities”, PepsiCo’s Manager of Facilities Planning, Constance Van Rhyn said. Members of United Spinal Association’s Accessibility Services team began to apply their experience in accessibility requirements and barrierfree design to what would often be exempt areas and facilities.

“While making suggestions to improve access to public spaces and offices within the Pepsi family was easy, what the Enable group asked us for was to apply the basic principles of accessibility to their industrial settings, to the actual assembly lines where their beverages and snack products are packaged,” Clair Hesselton, United Spinal’s president said. “Our accessibility specialists were asked to make suggestions on ways where an assembly line could accommodate a wheelchair user or how important messages could reach employees with hearing disabilities who could not hear intercom announcements over the noise level of all the machinery.”

A Nationwide Initiative

So far, United Spinal has reviewed and provided comments to improve access provided at PepsiCo’s Gatorade Facility in Indianapolis; the headquarters campuses for Frito-Lay in Plano, Texas and Quaker- Tropicana-Gatorade in Chicago, and Tropicana’s manufacturing complex in Bradenton, Florida. “These were things that we never considered before-like the height of emergency eye-wash stations that would have to be lowered if we hired a wheelchair user to work on one of our grade level assembly-lines, or how everyone would benefit from the addition of visually contrasting color strips on stairs (risers) to raised areas of the plant,” said Lance Oxley, plant manager of the Gatorade facility in Indianapolis.

In some instances, where it was possible to make accommodations to a work area, the great distance between facilities within the Tropicana plant complex was a problem.

“It was extremely hard to identify an exterior accessible route to the different buildings in Bradenton,” United Spinal Compliance Specialist Linda Volpe said. “There are literally miles between some of the buildings.”

One potential solution United Spinal recommended was for PepsiCo to purchase an accessible golf cart so an employee with a disability can get from place to place more easily.

“Everyone uses a golf cart to get around the Tropicana complex,” Dan Tellor, safety manager of the Bradenton/Tropicana facility said.

United Spinal’s Accessibility Services staff also presented an update on Friday, September 29, on a variety of accessibility issues and applications to plant and facility Managers at PepsiCo headquarters in Purchase, New York. To emphasize the mission of the Enable Network, United Spinal will also present workshops on Florida’s unique accessibility requirements to design and code enforcement professionals at Tropicana’s state of the art conference spaces to host upcoming workshops on accessibility requirements.

In addition to the work Accessibility Services is doing with PepsiCo, United Spinal is also developing a presentation on Disability Etiquette with PepsiCo’s Human Resources Department.

“The past year working with PepsiCo has been rewarding and we expect to continue and expand our relationship in the future,” said Hesselton.

Dominic Marinelli is director of Accessibility Services.