In a barter deal reached with the Soviet government in 1972, PepsiCo received the right to export and promote Stolichnaya vodka in the West in return for importing and marketing Pepsi-Cola in the Soviet Union.
In accordance with the contract, PepsiCo began supplying concentrate and machinery for 10 upcoming production facilities where concentrate would be diluted, bottled, and shipped across the nation.
But there was one problem: money. Due to Kremlin currency regulations, Soviet rubles could not be traded internationally, and it was also prohibited for anyone to go abroad with them.
As a result, a barter agreement was struck in which Pepsi concentrate and the right for its liter-for-liter distribution in the United States were exchanged for Stolichnaya vodka.
What was the first U.S. consumer product sold in the Soviet Union? It was Pepsi that was first sold in the Soviet Union as a consumer product. The first plant was supposed to be built in Sochi initially, but Novorossiysk was chosen instead because there were no close fresh water supplies.
When the plant first opened, many Soviet citizens went to Novorossiysk for two reasons: to take a vacation on the Black Sea and to try Pepsi.
By the end of 1982, seven more facilities were running in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tashkent, Tallinn, Alma-Ata, and Sukhumi.
Up to 1.9 million decaliters of Stolichnaya vodka, worth $25 million, were exported to the United States between 1973 and 1981, and 32.3 million decaliters of Pepsi, worth 303.3 million rubles, were created.
Only vodka sales in the United States were profitable for the corporation under the barter agreement with the USSR; Pepsi sales in the USSR were not profitable.
Like most people in the "non-Western" world, most Soviet citizens throughout the Soviet era made their purchases at small, frequently specialized service counters.
Officials from Kendall and the Soviet Union announced a deal in 1972 under which equivalent amounts of Pepsi would be exchanged for Stolichnaya and Sovetskaya vodka.
In the USSR, food was produced either by state agricultural enterprises (sovkhóz) or collective farmers on public land (kolkhóz). Production plans were given to each one of them. The state took the production and sent it to state-run businesses for processing.
It has frequently been asserted that Pepsi developed one of the largest fleets in the world by acquiring these ships. The ships that were bought as part of the 1989 deal were never given to the Norwegian company. Instead, they were sent to a scrap yard because they were out of date.
The Soviet Union in particular had trouble getting enough food because farming had slowed down.
What was the first U.S. consumer product sold in the Soviet Union? The first American consumer goods to be produced and marketed in the former Soviet Union was Pepsi.