Bottles of Pepsi are displayed in a store in New York City on March 17, 2025.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
The Federal Trade Commission voted to dismissa lawsuit filedin the last days of the Biden administration that accusedPepsicoof offering sweetheart pricing to big retailers.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson dissented to the suit when it was filed in January, when he was one of the regulator’s commissioners. Now the agency’s leader, Ferguson on Thursdayagain criticized the caseas “a nakedly political effort to commit this administration to pursuing little more than a hunch that Pepsi had violated the law.”
“The FTC’s outstanding staff will instead get back to work protecting consumers and ensuring a fair and competitive business environment,” he said in a statement.
The FTC voted 3-0 to drop the suit. The panel is supposed to be made up of five commissioners, no more than three of whom can share the same political party. But it is currently led by three Republicans after President Donald Trump fired its two Democratic commissioners in March. The two ousted officials haveslammed their removals as illegaland areurging a judge to reinstate them.
A PepsiCo spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Beyond its namesake soda, the company makes an array of snacks and other food products, including Doritos, Rold Gold pretzels and Sabra hummus.
The company criticized the FTC lawsuit in January, saying at the time that its pricing practices “are in line with industry norms and we do not favor certain customers by offering discounts or promotional support to some customers and not others.”
Top-ranking Democrats on Capitol Hillsent a letter to Pepsiover the weekend demanding more information about its pricing strategy. They sought to revive a Biden-era focus on price-gouging as a driver of inflation, an argument that has taken a back seat to the Trump administration’s attention on purportedly unfair trade arrangements.
But major corporations continue to draw scrutiny from the White House over pricing in other ways. Last weekend, Trumpslammed Walmartfor warning that it was likely to raise prices to offset the costs of his import taxes, demanding on social media that it “EAT THE TARIFFS.”
In the days since then, other major consumer brands haveappeared to tread cautiouslyaround pricing. Target said Wednesday that charging customers more would be its “very last resort.” Home Depot virtually ruled out price hikes this week, and Lowe’s barely mentioned tariff impacts in its Wednesday earnings call at all.
