SPD Scuola Politecnica di Design renews its long-standing collaboration with PepsiCo, confirming a partnership that continues to place Food Design at the center of an active dialogue between education and industry. The collaboration involves students from Master in Food Design and represents a concrete example of how design education can engage with real industrial contexts and contemporary food systems.
The Role of Design in Today’s Food Landscape
In today’s food landscape, products are often shaped by complex industrial processes optimized over time. Within this context, design plays a key role in bringing intentionality to form, texture, usability, and experience. Through the partnership with PepsiCo, students are invited to reflect on how food products can evolve, exploring the cultural, sensory, and experiential dimensions of food while working alongside technical, scientific, and production-driven constraints.
Learning Through Real Industry Projects
The collaboration offers students the opportunity to work on real industry scenarios, strengthening their ability to integrate design thinking into complex production processes. By engaging directly with a global company such as PepsiCo, students confront the realities of scale, innovation, and market dynamics, while PepsiCo benefits from a design-driven approach capable of opening new perspectives on how everyday food products can be reimagined to create more meaningful and engaging consumer experiences.
Educating Future Food Designers
As Martì Guixé, Course Leader of the Master in Food Design at SPD, explains, Food Design means understanding food as a designed experience, where form, process, perception, and culture are closely connected. Working on real projects allows students to develop a clear awareness of the designer’s role within the food industry, learning how to translate creative thinking into structured proposals that respond to concrete industrial challenges.
A Project Followed Throughout the Academic Year
Beyond the individual outcomes, the value of this collaboration lies in the process itself. Throughout the academic year, the project will be followed and documented across its different phases: from initial research and analysis, to concept development, prototyping, and continuous dialogue with the company. This step-by-step approach offers a unique opportunity to observe how design ideas evolve when confronted with real constraints, feedback, and industrial expertise.
By opening its educational path to a partnership with PepsiCo, SPD reinforces its commitment to an educational model in which collaboration with industry becomes a fundamental learning tool. A model that prepares future designers to operate within complex food systems, bridging creativity, research, and production, and highlighting how Food Design can actively contribute to shaping the future of food.