President Donald Trump made headlines on Wednesday, July 16, 2025, by writing on his Truth Social that Coca-Cola committed to switching from high-fructose corn syrup to genuine cane sugar in drink sold in the United States. “I have been working on getting REAL Cane Sugar into Coke in the United States, and they are agreeing to it,” Trump tweeted, saying that this would be “a very good thing on their part — You’ll see. It’s just better!”
The news generated gargantuan media coverage and triggered an instantaneous market response, as shares of high-fructose corn syrup manufacturers such as Archer-Daniels-Midland and Ingredion dropped by 6% and 7% respectively after Trump’s declaration.
Coca-Cola’s conscious reaction
But Coca-Cola’s reaction to Trump’s claims has been itself very restrained and uncombative. The company would not simply admit to a formula adjustment or to an agreement to replace sweeteners. Rather, Coca-Cola made a diplomatically worded statement: “We appreciate President Trump’s enthusiasm for our iconic Coca-Cola brand. Additional information on new innovative products in our Coca-Cola brand portfolio will be announced in the near future.”
This diplomatic reply sidesteps affirmative or negative validation of Trump’s claim and does reference the president’s promotion of the brand. The brand’s public relations official opted for deliberately imprecise talk about “new innovative offerings” instead of claiming total substitution of cane sugar in current products.
The current formula and historical context
Coca-Cola now uses high-fructose corn syrup in US offerings, a transition that began in the early 1980s. Since 1980, Coca-Cola had included corn syrup in its formula and was finished by 1984. The shift was highly driven by economic reasons: corn syrup became much cheaper than cane sugar because of government subsidies on corn as well as sugar import restrictions.
Interestingly, while US Coca-Cola does contain corn syrup, the company continues to utilize cane sugar in most of the rest of the globe, such as Mexico, the UK, Australia, and parts of the Middle East and Africa. Cane-sugar-produced Mexican Coca-Cola is cult-like within the US and is often sold at premium prices within US supermarkets.
The Make America Healthy Again connection
Trump’s initiative towards this shift is under his government’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy has been publicly calling for an end to high-fructose corn syrup for years, calling it “just a formula for making you obese and diabetic”. The MAHA campaign has prompted the food manufacturers to reformulate in the sense of ditching artificial ingredients and problematic additives.
This nutrition-oriented strategy has already caught up with the rest of the food industry, as 40 US ice cream manufacturers signed on to get out of artificial colorings by 2027. Kennedy has further signaled that new nutrition standards will nudge Americans toward more “whole foods.”
Industry pushback and economic concerns
The possible transition has been met with fierce resistance from the corn industry. John Bode, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Corn Refiners Association, claimed that “substituting high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar doesn’t make sense” and warned that it could “cost thousands of American food manufacturing jobs, dampen farm revenues, and boost imports of foreign sugar, all without any nutritional gain.”
The stakes are economic. The industry puts the elimination of U.S. domestic demand for high-fructose corn syrup at a potential $0.15 to $0.34 decrease in the price of corn per bushel and related cash receipts losses in corn of $2.2 to $5.1 billion. The Midwest would suffer most, with the loss expected to be in Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska.
The health debate
While Trump characterized the shift as a positive one, medical experts report that cane sugar and high-fructose corn syrup have the same type of health effect. Endocrinologist Dr. Saptarshi Bhattacharya explained how “cane sugar is sucrose, also referred to as table sugar. It is a single carbohydrate and is no better than high fructose corn syrup.”
Scientific research has tended to support this interpretation. A 2022 meta-analysis concluded there were no considerable differences between high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose for weight gain, body mass index, or most assessments of metabolism, although it did find an inflammatory marker increase when corn syrup was consumed. Both sweeteners are glucose and fructose in approximately equal ratio with corn syrup being 55% fructose and 50% in sugar.
