Consumers Take Up The Battle Against Corn Fructose
Piers Fawkes
The LA Times has an article to suggest that consumers are heeding the message that corn-fructose is bad for your health - but that the big soda brands are unable and unwilling to retool to adapt to the trend. The newspaper says that consumers are demanding products that are sweetened with sugar rather than the processed sweetener that your body doesn’t understand, your body can’t process properly, fools your body into believing that it’s still not full and, oh, makes you fat:
So many consumers have become wary of corn sweeteners that smaller drink makers such as Hansen, Jones and Thomas Kemper have reformulated their sodas to use cane sugar.
Taco Bell and other fast-food chains have added sugar-sweetened beverages as alternatives to their corn sweetener-laden soft drink menu.
Meanwhile, U.S. sales of Coca-Cola Classic made with corn sweetener fell 5.5% last year, according to the Beverage Industry 2008 Soft Drink Report. Sprite dropped 9.2%, Pepsi-Cola was down 8.9% and Mountain Dew declined 3.1%
…Beverage makers started the switch to high fructose corn syrup in the 1980s because it’s less expensive than sugar, decays less quickly, and is easier to transport and mix into formulas. Even with the recent increase in corn prices, it is still less expensive to use corn syrup than sugar.
The big beverage makers aren’t likely to spend money on retooling to go back to sugar, said beverage consultant Tom Pirko.
Won’t spend time retooling? Good. Let’s hope that dubious brands like CocaCola and Pepsi who won’t consider our health will go away then.
(If you need more information on this issue - can we suggest you read this book by Michael Pollan)
Consumers are raising cane over corn sweetener - Los Angeles Times
Related PSFK Articles
Agency Biz: Is Working On Soda Like Working On Tobacco
[img ref]
Posted on: Tuesday, August 5, 2008 at 6:00 pm 
Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.