Mohamed Shelbaya is the CEO of PepsiCo Egypt & North Africa, one of the world’s leading convenient food and beverages companies. The North Africa region is part of PepsiCo’s biggest and most important business sectors of the company AMESA (Africa, Middle East, South Asia). With his new position, Shelbaya is capitalizing on the business’s ongoing success in Egypt and further developing and diversifying its portfolio into neighboring regions. Prior to his new position, Shelbaya was the CEO of PepsiCo Egypt for six years during which the company witnessed vast enrichment across untapped areas and its portfolio was expanded. PepsiCo products are enjoyed by more than one billion person a day in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. Product portfolio—including Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew, Quaker, and SodaStream—consists of many iconic brands.
Shelbaya is a PepsiCo veteran with over 28 years of experience across Middle East and North Africa’s business models and markets. Since the start of his role in Egypt, Shelbaya took the business front to great milestones by exemplifying PepsiCo’s Faster, Stronger and Better strategy in the Egyptian market. He led the business to become Faster by winning in the marketplace, being more consumer-centric with unique campaigns like Mohamed Salah “Stay Thirsty” & “Chipsy Joy”, while accelerating investment for top line growth. In terms of Stronger, he led the digital transformation and go-to market strategy to have better customer visibility. While on the Better front, Shelbaya has been committed towards giving back to the community, keen on integrating purpose and sustainability into the business strategy, and doing even more for the planet and for the people.
He has made great strides in PepsiCo Egypt’s CSR agenda and led a unique sustainability model that doesn’t only focus on supporting social initiatives but it relies to a great extent on enabling the overall industry. Shelbaya was able to do this through strong and diverse sustainability and innovation programs in line with pep+ (PepsiCo Positive), an end-to-end strategic business transformation with sustainability at the center of how PepsiCo will create growth and value by operating within planetary boundaries to drive positive action for the planet and people.
He launched “Recycle for Tomorrow” one of the biggest waste management platforms in Egypt, “She Feeds the World” that aims to empower Egyptian female farmers, “She Works Wonders” that aims to increase female representation in male-dominated jobs, and finally “Egypt 2030 Hackathon” that empowers and enables young entrepreneurs, among other impact-driven initiatives.
Prior to this, Shelbaya was the Vice President of MENA Snacks Category where he played a critical role in driving the snacks business growth and leading the MENA snacks innovation revenue to unprecedented levels.
Shelbaya was also the General Manager, Egypt Snacks where he grew the business double-digit year-on-year, achieving break-through results on market share and equity metrics. Shelbaya has held a wide range of roles since joining the company back in 1994. He was the Vice President of PepsiCo’s bottling operations for Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and had previously served as Sales and Customer Development Director for the Middle East & Africa. He also held other leading positions in Marketing and Sales.
Going back through his thread of success before joining PepsiCo, Shelbaya set off his career in advertising working for Saatchi & Saatchi in Egypt and the GCC.
