Companies do listen to consumers’ complaints.
A few of them are replacing High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) in some of their beverages with — low and behold — sugar. HFCS is currently controversial. It’s a cheaper source of sugar for manufacturers to use than sugar.
Seriously.
That’s due to corn subsidies and sugar tariffs. Recently the FDA recently gave the go-ahead to call products containing HFCS natural. To me that is a bit of a stretch. Sugar comes from sugar cane or beets, HFCS comes from the processing of corn into corn starch, which is converted into corn syrup using enzymes and then with the help of additional enzymes (and some more steps) is turned into HFCS.
HFCS is everywhere (okay that’s a tad of an exaggeration). It’s in processed foods and beverages, including yogurt, bread, soups cookies, salad dressing, chips, cereals, pasta sauces and —of course — soft drinks. Because it’s so ubiquitous it’s been linked to our current obesity problem and diabetes.
But that’s another story. Let’s get back to the beverage brands (Snapple, Pepsi and Mt Dew) discarding HFCS from their drinks.
Snapple is switching back to sugar. Permanently. It’s reformulating its entire lineup of drinks to have 20% fewer calories using sugar instead of HFCS. They’re truly going “natural.”
Pepsi and Mt Dew, on the other hand, will be using sugar in place of HFCS in retro products that will soon be available in select markets and — according to Nicole Bradley, a Pepsi spokesperson — will only be on shelves until June.
Pepsi-Cola Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback are intended to be nostalgic versions of their regular drinks when they were sugar sweetened.
I’m with you. Great news about no HFCS anymore in Snapple — wish Pepsi would also remove it permanently
please get rid of high fructose corn syrup. It is a direct cause of obesity and other health problems. Please
I would love for the American market to drop HFCS from everything. Not only are it’s health effects controversial, it also tastes bad. Soda with HFCS has an oily texture and a very distinctive taste difference from those sweetenned with sugar. Diet soda’s are anything but diet and no one really knows the long term effects of drinking all of those chemicals necessary to sweeten the sodas. Other countries have sugar in their drinks and their drinks still sell and they don’t have an obesity problem. The only reason we have HFCS in our drinks here is greed. From the beverage and other food companies to the corn lobbies. If it were my company, I would not want my brand associated with something not only with potential for harm, but also inferior tasting.
I so agree!