Last week, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, implying that he had single-handedly convinced Coca-Cola to start using cane sugar in its signature soda, instead of the high fructose corn syrup that has been part of the recipe since 1974. The indignity! Plenty of Americans have been hoarding Mexican Coke made with cane sugar for years, begging the company to make it easier to get in the U.S., and suddenly this fascist clown is who they listen to? I didn’t want to believe it, especially given Trump’s propensity for bluster and falsehoods. But he is at least partially correct here.
In the company’s most recent earnings report, Coca-Cola announced that “this fall in the United States, the company plans to launch an offering made with U.S. cane sugar to expand its Trademark Coca-Cola product range. This addition is designed to complement the company’s strong core portfolio and offer more choices across occasions and preferences.” Unlike Trump’s claim that Coca-Cola “agreed” to use cane sugar, this will be a separate product, not a replacement for the high fructose corn syrup Coca-Cola formula currently on the market.
High fructose corn syrup is one of the many ingredients Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has railed against. But again, you will still be able to get corn syrup Coke, and “replacing one sugar with another isn’t going to have much of an effect on health,” Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, told the Washington Post.
Plenty of people who aren’t anti-vaxxers have concerns about the prevalence of high fructose corn syrup in American foodways, and crucially, Coca-Cola didn’t mention Trump or MAHA at all in its briefing. Perhaps the company is catering to the MAHA agenda, or perhaps it’s just identified an untapped market that will allow it to grow its $12.5 billion quarterly revenue. I am looking forward to having a more regularly available cane sugar version, it’s just deeply annoying that Trump is trying to take credit for this. Why would he even care? He’s a fridge cigarette guy!
