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# In 1992 Pepsi Paid Cash to Any Filipino Holding a Bottle Cap With the Number Read Out on the Evening News. On 25 May the Number Was 349, Which It Had Already Printed on Up to 800,000 Caps.
- URL: https://whywecanthavenicethings.info/pepsi-349/
- Published: 2026-10-20T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-20T15:59:59.000Z
- Author: The Complaints Department
- Tags: Corporate Memo

In February 1992 Pepsi-Cola Products Philippines and PepsiCo began a promotion called Number Fever. Under the crowns and resealable caps of Pepsi, 7-Up, Mirinda and Mountain Dew they printed three things: a three-digit number, a seven-character alphanumeric security code, and a cash prize of up to one million pesos, then about $37,000, tax-free. Each weekday a winning number was announced on television and in the papers, and anyone holding a cap with that number could collect the amount printed on it. The advertisements, as the Los Angeles Times put it, "were hardly subtle: 'Today, you could be a millionaire!'" The whole thing had been approved by the Department of Trade and Industry. A Mexican firm, D.G. Consultores, which had run similar promotions in other countries, chose the 60 winning numbers and their security codes in advance. According to the Supreme Court of the Philippines, 1,000 numbers were seeded in the market: 60 winners, 510 non-winners and 430 left unused. As the DTI required, the list of winners was put in a safety deposit box in a bank in Makati.

It worked. The Los Angeles Times reported that once the promotion started, sales of Pepsi and its other brands "zoomed nearly 40 percent." More than 51,000 people won cash, and 17 of them won a million pesos and were then used in Pepsi's advertising. Because of what the Supreme Court later called "the success of the promotional campaign," the companies added five weeks, to 12 June 1992\. New advertisements read "More chances to be a millionaire!" The Mexican consultants were brought back to pick 25 more winning numbers, this time from the list of unused ones.

## The Unused Number

On the evening of 25 May 1992, Channel 2's nightly news announced the winning number for the next day: 349\. The number was not unused. A trial court in Pasig later found that "number 349 was used both as a winning and non-winning number." There were a few genuine winning 349 caps, each with its own security code on the master list. There were also, by the Los Angeles Times's count, up to 800,000 caps that carried 349 and either of two other codes, L-2560-FQ or L-3560-FQ. When Pepsi and the DTI opened the safety deposit box on 28 May, neither code was on the list. Pepsi blamed "a computer software glitch," according to the Associated Press. Its spokesman in New York, Kenneth Ross, "repeatedly refused to explain how the bottle-cap mistake occurred."

The security code was printed on every cap, and the posters and warning advertisements had told the public what it was for. The Court of Appeals later quoted a "Warning Cheaters" poster: if a code did not match the master list, "then we know that the Crown is either fake or tampered with." As early as March 1992, the court noted, complaints about tampered crowns had reached the DTI. So the code had been sold to customers as protection against forgers. Now it was used to sort hundreds of thousands of genuine Pepsi caps, printed by Pepsi, into losers. The holders' complaint, as the AP summarised it, was that the promotional materials "did not say a 'winning' security code was needed as well, only that a security number determined the authenticity of the cap."

## The Goodwill

By the next morning, thousands of people with caps were outside the bottling plants. Pepsi locked the gates and put up barbed wire. An official who asked not to be named told the Los Angeles Times that executives decided at a pre-dawn meeting to offer a token payment. "They made two mistakes," he said. "You should never make a decision at 3 a.m. And they thought it was a few thousand people at most."

The statement went out under the name of Rod Salazar, president of Pepsi-Cola Products Philippines: "Some other 349 crowns which have security codes L-2560-FQ and L-3560-FQ are not winning crowns. However, as an act of goodwill to our customers, we will redeem the non-winning 349 crowns for P500.00 each until June 12, 1992 at all Pepsi plants & warehouses." That was about $18.50 a cap. According to the Supreme Court, 490,116 holders accepted it. The company had budgeted $2 million for the whole promotion's prizes. It paid roughly $10 million more in goodwill, and $6,000 to the government's consumer protection bureau, which the Baltimore Sun's version of the Los Angeles Times report described as "the maximum penalty under the law."

## The Fever

The others did not accept it. Pepsi's own records, cited by the Los Angeles Times, showed at least 32 delivery trucks stoned, torched or overturned. Molotov cocktails and homemade bombs were thrown at plants and offices. Police said that on 13 February 1993 a fragmentation grenade thrown at a parked Pepsi truck bounced off and killed a schoolteacher and a five-year-old girl, and wounded six other people. Executives travelled with bodyguards and changed their office hours. "For a time, we were eating death threats for breakfast," Rosemarie Vera, Pepsi's marketing director, told Reuters. The company pulled out all but two of its expatriate officials and left one in charge who had experience in Beirut. Its professional basketball team, the Pepsi-Cola Hotshots, was renamed the 7-Up Uncolas.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the cause had brought together "Communist rebels and army generals, well-dressed Manila matrons and barefoot rural peasants. All hold 349 caps." Pepsi's president, Christopher Sinclair, flew to Manila for an unannounced meeting with President Fidel Ramos, who said afterwards, "It's a special kind of case." The Senate Committee on Trade and Commerce accused Pepsi of "gross negligence." It also noted that Pepsi had been through a similar fiasco in Chile a month before 349, where, per the Los Angeles Times, "a garbled fax" had put the wrong number on television. Ross put Pepsi's position like this: "We will not be held hostage to extortion and terrorism." Pepsi's market share, Reuters reported, fell from 26 percent to 17.

## The Docket

By July 1993 more than 22,000 people had filed 689 civil suits and more than 5,200 criminal complaints, which the Los Angeles Times noted "far outnumber" the claims against Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, "who are accused of looting up to $10 billion." The Court of Appeals upheld arrest orders against ten local Pepsi executives. The company appealed, and no one was arrested. The Department of Justice ruled in January 1993 that there was no basis for criminal charges, and by August state prosecutors had dismissed about 6,800 cases.

The civil cases took longer. The Supreme Court turned away claimants in Rodrigo in 2001 and Mendoza in 2002, upholding findings that the security code was "an indispensable element of a winning crown" and that the companies "were not negligent." In Patan, in 2004, it removed even a 500-peso award the Court of Appeals had made "in the interest of justice," because the goodwill offer "had long expired on June 12, 1992." In De Mesa, in 2005, the court did not reopen the facts, on the principle of stare decisis. Jaime Lacanilao had won 1,050,000 pesos at trial and kept it at the Court of Appeals. By the time his case reached the Supreme Court he had signed a compromise, waived his claims and joined Pepsi in asking for the judgment in his favour to be overturned. On 15 June 2006 the court found that "The issues surrounding the '349' incident have been laid to rest and must no longer be disturbed." A court spokesman told the Philippine Star that this "should be the defining decision." Pepsi's lawyer, Alexander Poblador, told the same paper the company had paid more than 200 million pesos to close to 500,000 non-winning claimants.

On 12 October 2006 the court reversed a Court of Appeals award of five million pesos to Pepe Pagdanganan and 1.2 million to Pepito Lumahan, and reinstated the trial court's dismissal. That trial court had ordered Pepsi to pay them 3,500 and 1,000 pesos in goodwill. The Supreme Court took that away as well. "Those things which have been so often adjudged," it wrote, quoting a 1620 English case, "ought to rest in peace."

In October 1993 scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave Pepsi-Cola of the Philippines the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for announcing the wrong winning number, which, according to the citation, "incited and united 800,000 expectant winners, 'bringing many warring factions together for the first time in their nation's history.'" A Senate committee had accused Pepsi of gross negligence. The Supreme Court found none. The security code had been there, as the posters said, to keep out the fakes.

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*Filed from public reporting:*

- [Los Angeles Times (via The Seattle Times) — "Pepsi-Cola Uncaps A Lottery Nightmare -- Bombings, Threats Follow Contest With Too Many Winners"](https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19930726/1712840/pepsi-cola-uncaps-a-lottery-nightmare)
- [Los Angeles Times (via The Baltimore Sun) — "Blunder turns to anti-Pepsi fever as Filipinos demand their contest prizes"](https://www.baltimoresun.com/1993/07/27/blunder-turns-to-anti-pepsi-fever-as-filipinos-demand-their-contest-prizes/)
- [The Washington Post — "A Pepsi Giveaway, Gone Wrong"](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1993/07/29/a-pepsi-giveaway-gone-wrong/1a6af4b1-2b6f-4e5a-9b1d-5dc6799ac2af/)
- [Associated Press (via The Phnom Penh Post) — "Botched Cap Promotion Haunts Pepsi"](https://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/botched-cap-promotion-haunts-pepsi)
- [The New York Times / Reuters — "Company News: An Unlucky Number; Pepsi Caps the Damages On a Promotion Gone Flat"](https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/18/business/company-news-an-unlucky-number-pepsi-caps-the-damages-on-a-promotion-gone-flat.html)
- [UPI — "Pepsi-Cola gets 'Ig Nobel Peace Prize'"](https://www.upi.com/Archives/1993/10/08/Pepsi-Cola-gets-Ig-Nobel-Peace-Prize/6600750052800/)
- [Supreme Court of the Philippines — "PepsiCo, Inc. v. Jaime Lacanilao, G.R. No. 146007, 15 June 2006"](https://lawphil.net/judjuris/juri2006/jun2006/gr%5F146007%5F2006.html)
- [Supreme Court of the Philippines — "Pepsi-Cola Products Philippines, Inc. v. Pagdanganan, G.R. No. 167866, 12 October 2006"](https://lawphil.net/judjuris/juri2006/oct2006/gr%5F167866%5F2006.html)
- [The Philippine Star — "SC decides in finality on 'Pepsi 349' case"](https://www.philstar.com/cebu-news/2006/06/26/344000/sc-decides-finality-pepsi-349-case)