Coca-Cola has laid out plans to launch a product made with US cane sugar this year, days after Donald Trump claimed the company had agreed to replace high-fructose corn syrup.
According to The Guardian, the company announced the change in a quarterly earnings report released on Tuesday.
On a conference call with investors, Coca-Cola’s chairperson and CEO, James Quincey, said the company planned “to expand our trademark … product range with US cane sugar to reflect consumer interest in differentiated experiences”.
Quincey said the new offering would “complement” Coca-Cola’s core portfolio of drinks, suggesting it could arrive as an alternative, rather than a replacement, for its flagship Coke product.
“This is really an ‘and’ strategy and not an ‘or’ strategy,” Quincey said, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We are going to continue to use a lot of the corn syrup that we do now.”
The drink maker’s Mexican Coke is made with cane sugar and already sold in the US – but often at nearly twice the price.
Additionally, the US doesn’t make enough cane sugar to satisfy demand in the country.
Tuesday’s announcement from Coca-Cola came as food and drink companies have rolled out plans to make changes amid “Make America healthy again” (Maha) campaign of the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.
