President Donald Trump, a Diet Coke enthusiast, has channeled the might of the presidency into a major policy change that will improve the lives of millions of Americans.
Just kidding. What he actually did was yell on his social media site, which led Coca-Cola to release a cane sugar–sweetened version of its signature soda, which is usually sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.
On Tuesday, Coca-Cola announced it would begin to sell cane sugar–sweetened Coke in America starting this fall, after Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushed the company to do so. The cane sugar Coke, which has long been sold in Mexico, won’t replace normal Coke, but will just be a supplemental offering, and likely a pricier one. And it’s still, you know, soda, which decades of research has shown to be pretty bad for your health.
RFK Jr. has been a longtime critic of high-fructose corn syrup, saying that it “is just a formula for making you obese and diabetic” in campaign videos. It’s not that cane sugar is much better than high-fructose corn syrup—excess consumption of both can cause weight gain and higher blood sugar, but studies have found that neither is worse than the other. It’s also worth mentioning that Americans can already buy “Mexican Coke,” which is made with cane sugar, at major retailers like Costco and Target, but no matter.
Trump heralded the cane sugar Coke on Truth Social, which was later announced on the White House X page and retweeted by RFK Jr. The same social media fawning happened when Froot Loops promised to cut synthetic dyes by 2027, when PepsiCo said it would eliminate artificial colors and flavors from Lay’s and Tostitos chips and that it’s doing a prebiotic version of Pepsi Cola with cane sugar and fiber, and when Steak ’n Shake promised to nix seed oils.
If you’re a big food corporation, it seems like all it takes to get free advertising from Trump, the White House, and RFK Jr. is to make a superficial promise and set a long deadline to accomplish it. Doesn’t this just give major food corporations, which still heavily process their food and engineer it to have addictive properties, more of a platform and more sales?
A voluntary agreement to add a new product offering or change an ingredient can be switched back at the discretion of the company. Meanwhile, the importance of eating actually healthy foods instead of somewhat-less-unhealthy substitutes hasn’t really been addressed in this MAHA age.
There are also economic consequences to the new Coke plan. Understandably, corn farmers in the Midwest are worried that a shift away from corn products will hurt their bottom lines. The Corn Refiners Association said that a complete elimination of high-fructose corn syrup in U.S. foods and drinks would cause a loss of $5.1 billion for American farmers. The Coke switch is certainly not a complete removal of high-fructose corn syrup from America’s food system, but it still has farmers on edge.
Only about 3 percent of the American corn industry’s bushels are used to make corn syrup, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service. That means that the Coke switch shouldn’t have an outsized impact on corn farmers and downstream processors. The market was nervous, though: After Trump’s announcement, stock prices for food processing companies Archer-Daniels-Midland and Ingredion dropped 6 and 7 percent, respectively.
And then there’s the problem with actually getting the cane sugar. America produces far more corn than sugar, in large part due to a domestic sugar monopoly. The Biden administration tried to block a sugar company merger that would lead to just two corporations controlling 75 percent of the market back in 2022. But the USDA’s top sugar industry analyst, Barbara Fesco, testified to the presiding U.S. district court judge that she believed the merger wouldn’t cause prices to rise and that she trusted the companies’ executives.
The judge let the merger go through, dealing a blow to Biden’s antitrust agenda and handing a win to sugar companies. It was a stunning example of a government official testifying on behalf of the very corporations her government was working to regulate. And it means that American sugar is getting more and more expensive.
This monopoly is part of why America underproduces sugar and relies instead on imports from countries like the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Mexico. Domestically, cane sugar is only produced in two states: Louisiana and Florida. Imported cane sugar is subject to a two-tier tariff system that kicks in higher tariffs once imports cross a certain threshold. Last year, America imported $2.5 billion worth of sugar, and exported just $379 million. With a heavy reliance on tariffed exported sugar, consumers will be the ones to front the costs, especially under Trump’s tariff regime.
It’s not exactly “America First” to force business changes that increase the trade deficit. But maybe that’s how Trump and RFK Jr. will make America healthy again … by making Coke too expensive to buy.