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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.
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.
In recent years though, the US has become even more reliant on record amounts of high-taxed imports after droughts impacted Mexican supplies. Trump's threat of a 50% tariff on Brazil also risks raising prices. If cane-sweetened Cokes are a success, higher demand would add to the pressure.
Refined cane sugar cost more than 52 cents a pound in June, about 12% more than the high-fructose corn syrup used in Coke and nearly 50% more than beet sugar, according to the USDA.
US refiners have some spare capacity to process more raw cane, but that will depend on imports and is still "not going to be able to go on the scale of a mass distribution like a classic Coke," said Ruffolo. Expansions to cane acreage are also limited. Louisiana's growth could be capped at 10%, while Florida doesn't have much more land for cane, he added.
Coke has been working with cane sugar suppliers, and believes they will be able to bring enough supply to market if there is demand from consumers, Chief Executive Officer James Quincey said on Fox Business.
• RFK Jr.'s Push
The new Coke product comes as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has railed against the prevalence of ultra-processed foods, which are generally more likely to use high-fructose corn syrup. The company's move, while an incremental shift away from corn, could open the door for other companies to follow suit.
PepsiCo Inc. Chief Executive Officer Ramon Laguarta said last week that it would follow consumer preferences on sugar and other natural ingredients.
Coca-Cola uses cane in other US products like lemonades and teas, and is looking to use "the whole toolkit of available sweetening options to some extent where there are consumer preferences," Quincey said on a Tuesday earnings call. The new Coke with US cane sugar is expected to be "an enduring option for consumers," he added.
It is still unclear how much sugar these new products will require, said Claudiu Covrig, the lead analyst at Covrig Analytics. It could end up being a tiny segment with "more publicity than real volume," he said. But if US beverage companies shift significantly toward cane instead of high-fructose corn syrup, additional imports could range from 300,000 to 800,000 metric tons.
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