[d1sxeyes]

Watch out for survivorship bias here. How many people worked in the bottling plants who did NOT become CEO?

A bit of Fermi maths here: the Pepsi Bottling Group had about 70K employees before it was bought by PepsiCo. Assuming a management/admin/support layer of about 50%, you've got maybe 35K employees directly engaged in bottling. This was only one of a multitude of bottling companies, but let's assume for now that while other bottling companies produce for other companies too there's probably no easy path from supplier to parent company unless the supplier is effectively a subsidiary.

From 1957 to today is 67 years. F&B turnover is around 75%, so we're talking about ~25 000 new employees/year for 67 years, which is around 1.8 million.

When you look at this astronomic career progression as a one-in-two-million event, it seems a bit less implausible.

Now for a bit of a silly tangent: there are around 33 million businesses in the USA now, and around 330 million people, which means around one business for every 10 people. Assuming each one of those companies has a distinct CEO (big assumption here), we'd find around 180 000 CEOs who once worked in a Pepsi bottling plant. It would almost be a surprise if one of those 180 000 was NOT the CEO of Pepsi.