(Bloomberg) — After four decades drinking Coca-Cola sweetened with corn syrup, Americans are going to get the chance to buy the soda made from domestic cane sugar. But whether US farmers can meet that demand is unclear.
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Coca-Cola Co. said Tuesday it will launch the new Coke variety this fall, a week after President Donald Trump said the company had agreed to start using the sweetener.
The move is hardly an outlandish idea. In fact, Coke sold in other countries like Mexico is sweetened with cane sugar. And the company relied on cane sugar before switching to high fructose corn syrup around 1980. While the company will still be using corn syrup for original Coke, the addition of a domestic cane-based soda could help growers in Louisiana and Florida at a time when demand has been slow.
However, a sustained bump in demand — especially if other companies follow Coca-Cola’s lead — risks outstripping homegrown availability. US cane only makes up about 30% of overall domestic sugar supplies, according to the US Department of Agriculture. The rest comes from imports, which were about 2.2 million metric tons for the 2025-26 season, and American-grown sugar beets that perform better in colder climates.
“We have ways of trying to assist in new product launches, but mass usage — it would be very difficult for our industry to absorb that,” said Craig Ruffolo, a vice president at McKeany-Flavell, a broker of ingredients including sugar.
A sugar supply shortfall would likely mean more cane imports from Mexico and Brazil, exposing American companies and consumers to higher prices just as they are facing market upheaval from Trump’s tariffs. Cane sugar is more expensive than high-fructose corn syrup.
On top of that, long-standing import tariffs mean US raw cane sugar futures are already more than double what the rest of the world pays. That price gap widened to a record on Tuesday.
Foreign shipments can be costly, as decades-old US government policies limit how much sweetener can be cheaply shipped from other countries. That has long kept US sugar prices above that of the global market, even when lower-taxed imports under the US’s limits and preferential shipments from Mexico were enough to keep the country amply supplied.
