Coca-Cola to Launch US Cane Sugar Coke This Fall After Trump Pressure

It’s official: America will soon have a Mexican Coke of its own.

The Atlanta-based soft drink corporation said Tuesday that it plans to launch a version of Coca-Cola made with US cane sugar this fall to expand its traditional product range.

“I think that will be an enduring option for consumers,” CEO James Quincey told investors on the company’s quarterly earnings call.

Quincey said the company currently uses cane sugar in a range of other beverages in its US portfolio, including lemonade, tea, coffee, and vitamin water.

He said the company is looking to use the “whole toolkit of available sweetening options” to cater to various consumer preferences.

The move comes after President Donald Trump pressured the company to ditch corn syrup in its flagship soda.

“I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States,” Trump said in a social media post earlier in July. “This will be a very good move by them — You’ll see. It’s just better!”

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While Trump is famously an avid consumer of Diet Coke, Quincey has previously said Trump is a fan of both the diet and regular versions of soda.

“He actually goes back and forth,” Quincey told CNBC in January.

Coca-Cola currently markets a cane sugar-sweetened version of its soda as Coca‑Cola Mexico, since many of its sodas sold in Mexico are made with cane sugar. Many of its other products are sweetened with corn syrup. Corn producers receive heavy government subsidies, which generally make corn syrup cheaper to use than cane sugar.

Data from investment analytics group Reflexivity estimates that a full switch from corn syrup to cane sugar in Coca-Cola’s products would translate to a 35% surge in demand for the commodity, or an additional 1.4 million metric tons of sugar a year.

Most US production of sugar cane is concentrated in Florida and Louisiana, according to the USDA. Brazil and India are two of the largest global producers of the crop.