【By Observer Net, Zhang Jingjuan】U.S. President Trump excitedly announced the good news that Coca-Cola would be produced with real sugar, but before his words had even fallen silent, he was "faced with a rebuttal," as Coca-Cola Company stated that it had not promised to make any changes.

However, PepsiCo took up the conversation and gave Trump some face.

According to Reuters, on the 17th, PepsiCo said that if consumers demanded it, its Pepsi products would use sugar. The company will also reform its popular snack brands.

Pepsi executives said that the company plans to focus on promoting the fact that its chips or corn chips from the Lay's and Tostitos brands will contain no artificial colors or flavors when they re-launch these brands later this year.

Pepsi CEO Ramon Laguarta said in a call with investors, "We are striving to strengthen the brand perception of Lay's as 'natural food.' Potato chips are the simplest and most natural snack - their ingredients are just potatoes, oil, and a little salt, with minimal components and no artificial additives."

The company also said it would expand the use of avocado oil and olive oil in its brands, replacing the current rapeseed oil or soybean oil.

In April this year, Pepsi had already announced plans to switch all product lines to natural pigments, or offer "no synthetic pigments" options for consumers. The bright colors of Cheetos snacks and Gatorade drinks currently rely on synthetic pigments.

Currently, the "Simply" series under Pepsi has already launched Lay's and Doritos products without artificial colors and flavors.

Lay's potato chips IC photo

The report states that this reform comes at a time when U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is advocating Americans to consume "natural foods" and pressuring manufacturers to stop using dyes.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is 71 years old, has repeatedly claimed to "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA), and has long believed that the United States needs to curb the obesity epidemic by reducing high-sugar, high-fat, and highly processed foods in the national diet.

The day before PepsiCo announced its reform (on the 16th), Trump posted on his self-created social media platform "Truth Social" that Coca-Cola had agreed to use real sugar in the United States to produce cola.

However, according to CNBC, when asked about Trump's remarks, Coca-Cola did not commit to making any changes.

The company stated in a statement, "We appreciate President Trump's enthusiasm for our iconic Coca-Cola brand. We will soon share more detailed information about innovation products in our Coca-Cola product line."

Trump is well known for his love of drinking Coke. The sweetness of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup differs slightly, with the former initially being the ingredient that gave cola its sweetness. However, due to reasons such as the U.S. government imposing tariffs on imported sugar in the 1980s, which led to an increase in the price of sugar, Coca-Cola changed its ingredients to high-fructose corn syrup.

Although sugar has a slight nutritional advantage over high-fructose corn syrup, industry analysts pointed out that adjusting the formula of other Coca-Cola products and other beverages and candies sold in the U.S. market would require significant adjustments to the enterprise supply chain (due to different suppliers of corn syrup and sugar), need to modify product labels, and costs would rise.

The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) said that if high-fructose corn syrup were completely removed from the U.S. food and beverage supply chain, the price of corn per bushel (1 U.S. bushel is equivalent to 35.238 liters) might fall by 34 cents, leading to a loss of $5.1 billion in agricultural income.

"This economic shock wave would lead to job losses in rural areas and cause serious economic impacts on communities across the country," CRA said.

PepsiCo and Coca-Cola IC photo

Analyst Heather Jones pointed out in a research report that producing one pound of high-fructose corn syrup requires about 2.5 pounds of corn, so a large reduction in the use of corn syrup in the U.S. market would suppress corn demand and harm corn growers. At the same time, because domestic U.S. sugar production is insufficient to meet consumer demand for sweetness, sugar imports may increase.

U.S. government data shows that approximately 400 million bushels of corn are used annually to produce corn syrup required for beverages and other foods, accounting for about 2.5% of the total U.S. corn production.

U.S. annual sugar production is about 3.6 million tons (half of which is produced in Trump's hometown, Florida), while corn syrup production is about 7.3 million tons.

Analyst Michael McDougall said that Trump's ongoing trade wars will make it more difficult to fill this gap.

"Sugar is likely to be imported from Brazil, the world's largest sugar producer, but Trump has just imposed a 50% import tariff on Brazilian sugar."

James McDonnell, partner at CIL Management Consulting, said that sugar is not only more expensive, but the bottling plants of Coca-Cola were originally designed to use high-fructose corn syrup.

McDonnell said that adjusting the formula would require additional investment, and bottling plants are unlikely to be willing to bear this cost, and consumers would be dissatisfied with the price increase, and "the anger over rising egg prices has already made them angry."

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