Coca-Cola vs. PepsiCo: $1,000 each with dividends reinvested for 30 years

Put $1,000 into Coca-Cola and $1,000 into PepsiCo at the close of October 9, 1996, and reinvest every dividend in more shares. Thirty years later, at the close of October 9, 2026, the PepsiCo stake would be worth about $10,023 and the Coca-Cola stake about $7,637. The S&P 500, through the SPY fund with dividends reinvested, turned $1,000 into about $18,714 over the same period, so both trailed the index.

In October 1997 PepsiCo spun off its restaurant businesses — KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell — as TRICON Global Restaurants, one TRICON share for every ten PepsiCo shares. That was a distribution of shares, not a cash dividend. We follow the standard adjusted price data, which values it at $3.20 per PepsiCo share: it is reinvested in the reinvested line, counted as cash in the cash line, and left out of every dividend-per-share figure below.

PepsiCo led for 27 years

The two lines traded the lead back and forth in the first three years. Since December 1999, PepsiCo has been ahead at every month-end — 323 in a row — and it led at 346 of the 361 month-ends overall. Coca-Cola’s 15 months in front all came before 2000.

The difference was made early. Coca-Cola’s price peaked in June 1998, and the price-only stake fell 54.0% to its low in November 2004; it did not get back to the 1998 level until November 2014, sixteen years later. With dividends reinvested, the stake fell 50.1% to February 2003 and recovered by December 2010. PepsiCo’s worst stretch was the financial crisis: the reinvested stake fell 35.7% from November 2007 to February 2009 and was back above its old high by May 2011.

Two long dividend streaks

Coca-Cola raised its quarterly dividend to $0.53 in February 2026, $2.12 a year, which it calls its “64th consecutive annual increase.” PepsiCo announced a 4% increase in its annualized dividend to $5.92 from $5.69, starting with the June 2026 payment, its “54th consecutive annual dividend per share increase.” In our data, both annual totals rose in every year from 1998 to 2025.

Per share, PepsiCo’s 2025 dividend was 11.48 times its 1997 level, Coca-Cola’s 7.29 times. For the original $1,000 investor who kept the cash, Coca-Cola paid $11.26 in 1997 and $82.01 in 2025; PepsiCo paid $17.19 and $197.33.

Where the two stand now

The last twelve months went in opposite directions. Coca-Cola closed at $88.05 on October 9, 2026, up 32.7% in a year and 4.3% below its record close of $91.99 on August 24, 2026. PepsiCo closed at $125.97, down 13.0% in a year and 35.8% below its record close of $196.12 on May 12, 2023. That gap is why PepsiCo’s trailing dividend yield, 4.61%, is almost twice Coca-Cola’s 2.39%: the yield rose because the price fell.

Reinvesting multiplied the Coca-Cola result by 1.59 compared with keeping the cash, and the PepsiCo result by 1.42. Over the whole thirty years, the PepsiCo line finished 1.31 times the Coca-Cola line.

Two data fixes

The usual free price data has two errors here, and we corrected both against the annual reports. It lists a duplicate Coca-Cola payment dated September 12, 2001, when markets were closed after the September 11 attacks; the 10-K shows $0.72 a share for 2001, four payments of $0.18 before the 2012 split. And it lists the TRICON spin-off as a dividend.

Method: no taxes or trading costs, fractional shares allowed, dividends reinvested at the close of the ex-dividend date, and cash kept aside earns nothing. The SPY result is net of the fund’s fee. The Coca-Cola and PepsiCo pages show each company’s full dividend history, and the dividends page ranks U.S. companies by consecutive years of increases. Not investment advice.