The Secret History of Why Soda Companies Switched From Sugar to High-Fructose Corn Syrup

by Tom Philpott (Mother Jones) In a mesmerizing recent article, Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy recounts the surprising backstory of one of corporate marketing’s greatest flops: Coca-Cola’s quickly aborted 1985 effort to tweak its formula and convince consumers to accept “New Coke.”

Coca-Cola had already started adding high-fructose corn syrup to the mix five years before the New Coke fiasco. By 1984, a year before New Coke’s debut, the switch was complete: sugar out, HFCS in.

But while corn subsidies played a role in the story, another, less-famous government intervention likely played an even bigger role. The tale—which I first saw laid out in Richard Manning’s excellent 2005 book Against the Grain—started in the early 1971, when a massive, surprise sale of US grain to the Soviet Union triggered a boom in corn prices, which in turn led to a massive ramp-up in corn planting. By the mid-’70s, corn prices had returned to earth; but buoyed by subsidies, farmers kept planting “fencerow to fencerow,” as then-department of agriculture chief Earl Butz put it. The result: massive overproduction of corn. (The current corn glut, on the heels of the ethanol-driven boom of 2006-2012, followed a similar pattern.)

Corn-processing giants like Archer Daniels Midland had access to all the cheap corn they could ever want, but could only make a profit with it if they could find new markets for corn products. The company came up with two big ideas: ethanol, designed to disrupt the massive gasoline market; and high-fructose corn syrup, which the company hoped would break up Big Sugar’s hold on the soda industry.

They’re related, because both involve a process called “wet-milling” that isolates corn’s starch. To make ethanol, you ferment the starch and distill it into pure alcohol. To make HFCS, you add an enzyme to the starch that transforms some of its glucose into fructose—producing something with a sweetness profile similar to sugar. A single wet-milling plant could make both, and ADM began investing big in wet-milling in the early 1970s, a time when high gasoline and sugar prices offered opportunity for cheaper substitutes. READ MORE