Case study

PepsiCo CoLab Experience Center

Old Post Office, Chicago

Crushed ice, a blue Quaker barn and Gatorade’s lightning bolt: inside PepsiCo’s CoLab in the Old Post Office, Chicago.

For years, PepsiCo’s Chicago teams were spread across a 17-story tower on West Monroe Street, with Gatorade, Quaker, Tropicana, and the central North America beverage division stacked floor by floor. Then everyone moved into the Old Post Office, a 1920s landmark that had stood empty for decades, and 1.300 people found room on a single floor.

Most people know PepsiCo’s brands long before they know PepsiCo. The CoLab Experience Center is where the company behind them shares the stories of its beverage and food portfolio with customers, and where its executives get together. It opened in 2021.

What we built

Three walls

LED covers three walls from floor to ceiling, with a long table in the middle. Visitors are immersed in PepsiCo’s brand stories. Presentations become experiences and natural conversations, non-linear and spontaneous. People lean into the story instead of zoning out.

A Surface Studio on that table starts the story. From there, most scenes are steered by touching the LED walls themselves, and the walls jump from one world to the next. Bottles and cans tumble through crushed ice. A blue Quaker barn stands in a field of wheat. Sliced citrus and kiwi take over, followed by Gatorade’s lightning bolt and Chicago’s Cloud Gate on a bright winter day. All of it runs on The Storytelling Suite (TSS), our in-house software, and an operator can still take over from the TSS control screen at any time.

The shelf

Next door, warmly lit shelves hold the real thing: LIFEWTR, Tropicana, Gatorade, a can of Mtn Dew and a bag of Cheetos. Between them, two portrait displays set Mtn Dew and Pepsi in motion. The product stays within reach, and the moving image does the explaining. Product comparisons made easy: old vs. new packaging, or PepsiCo vs. the competition.

The column

A glowing LED column tells a different kind of story, and it has more than one. The one visitors see most is “PepsiCo: In Their Own Words”, with quotes from employees and customers. Another covers PepsiCo’s sustainability progress. Both are stories a customer can take in on the way to the lounge, which beats slide 34 of a presentation by some distance.

Two jobs, one space

Customer visits and executive meetings share the same floor, and nothing needs switching over. A typical session simply moves through the space. The immersive room sets the scene, the product shelf goes deeper, and the lounge, with two large Surface displays for whiteboarding and classic presentations, makes room for conversation. Often the group heads back to the immersive room at the end, for a planogram session or to close the meeting.

On the way out, a hologram box just outside the CoLab sets up the photo moment, made for Instagram.

The challenge

The trick was giving a portfolio of famous brands, each with its own look and its own loyal fans, one shared home without flattening them into a single corporate voice. And making that home work as well for a customer visit as for a board-level meeting.

Powerful brand stories start conversations, and conversations sell. These days, the CoLab also tests what goes on the shelf next.