On August 27, 2020, Hurricane Laura made landfall in southeast Louisiana. It was one of the strongest hurricanes on record to hit U.S. shores. Toya Garraway had been the Zone Sales Director of the Shreveport region for just a year. She had trained for nine months as a Zone Sales Leader Designate in Houston, so she had seen bad southern storms before, but not like this.
“That storm decimated 75% of my zone. I had five sites without power and employees without water,” she says. The PepsiCo network swung into action. Pallets of water were delivered to her hardest-hit sites. The fleet team arrived with fuel trucks at each location to fuel the employees’ trucks and their personal cars.
But what really surprised her was the other Zone Directors — some from neighboring zones and some from other states — who pitched in to help. “Many of them hopped in their cars and drove hours to get here,” she says. “They were using chainsaws to clear paths to our sites, delivering food and water on their way south to Lake Charles. Here are these guys who I compete with every week, and they were driving through the night to bail me out. It was incredible.”