PepsiCo is closing its South Knoxville bottling facility, a move affecting 122 employees. The company says it is working to place those workers at nearby facilities.
According to WBIR, employees were informed of the closure on Oct. 19, a Monday, and PepsiCo is working to place affected staff at other nearby facilities. A separate report by 3B Media News puts the affected workforce at 122 and says workers will continue receiving full pay and benefits through January 1, 2027.
A Notice Window Built Into Federal Law
The extended pay period through January isn't simply corporate goodwill — it tracks with legal notice requirements. Tennessee law and the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act require employers with 50 or more workers to give 60 days' advance written notice of a plant closure to employees and state dislocated worker units, according to the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development. State Rapid Response teams are typically triggered within 48 hours to assist workers caught in these closures.
This isn't the first time PepsiCo has moved this way. Hoodline previously reported layoffs affecting 98 of 143 workers at its Cheverly, Maryland, facility in September 2026, as production wound down while sales and delivery operations were expected to continue. The Knoxville closure also follows PepsiCo's October 2024 shutdown of four bottling facilities in Chicago, Cincinnati, Harrisburg, and Atlanta, which together eliminated nearly 400 positions after multi-quarter drops in North American beverage sales volume.
A Planned Denver Facility
PepsiCo has also planned a facility near Denver International Airport, scheduled to open in 2023 to replace its River North site, which had operated since the 1950s.
Independent regional bottlers are taking a different path. Buffalo Rock, the nation's largest family-owned Pepsi bottler, completed a $300 million infrastructure overhaul across the Southeast in 2026, expanding its Homewood, Alabama campus with in-house bottle manufacturing to supply regional markets — even as sites like Knoxville's consolidate or shut down.
Local Labor Market Context
The closure lands in Knoxville's manufacturing sector. The University of Tennessee's Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research had projected in its 2026 economic report that Tennessee manufacturing employment would see a minor contraction amid broader statewide cooling in nonfarm job growth, with statewide real GDP growth projected at 2% for the year.
