A soft-drink deal ran into a shortage of cash
The unlikely fleet grew out of PepsiCo’s effort to sell cola in the Soviet Union. The company had built a market there, but Soviet money could not be freely exchanged for the dollars needed to pay foreign suppliers. So the two sides relied on barter: PepsiCo received Soviet goods it could sell elsewhere, while the Soviets received Pepsi products and concentrate.
By 1989, the arrangement had expanded to include naval vessels. In exchange for Pepsi concentrate, PepsiCo took ownership of a group of Soviet ships, including 17 submarines and several surface warships. The vessels were payment in kind—not a prize taken in battle or a fleet the company had set out to build.
Why the “sixth-largest navy” line stuck
Count the ships on paper and the haul was large enough to invite a startling comparison with the world’s navies. That is the basis for the claim that Pepsi briefly had the sixth-largest fleet. But counting hulls does not make a company a naval power: these were aging Soviet vessels, and PepsiCo had no reason to operate them as fighting ships.
The company instead moved them on to a shipbreaking firm, where they could be dismantled for scrap. The fleet was therefore a temporary consequence of a commercial workaround. When a customer could not pay in convertible currency, PepsiCo accepted what the Soviet side could provide—and, for a moment, that meant submarines.
