Experts question impact of sugar specialty lines

Mikkel Pates,Agweek
Published: 05/25/2009

FARGO, N.D. — Some food and beverage marketers are testing whether consumers want sugar to retake some of the ground lost to high-fructose corn syrup in the past two decades.

The most high-profile recent effort is the marketing of “Throwback” brands of Pepsi-Cola products, including Pepsi and Mountain Dew. The packaging is reminiscent of neon swirl typeface — promoted as containing “natural sugar.”

There is no report, yet, about how the campaign is going.

Pepsi Throwback products occupied a small place at the bottom of shelves in both Hornbacher’s and SunMart stores in Fargo, N.D. — both priced on special at four 12-packs for $12, or 25 cents a can.

Nicole Bradley, a spokeswoman for Pepsi-Cola North America Beverages, asked how the promotion was going at its halfway point, didn’t offer numbers but said, the “Throwback beverages have been very popular with consumers.” At the roll-out, Bradley told food and beverage writers the product gives a “nod to the fun things off the past” or a “new twist” on favorite brands.The introduction of the product and others has created some question whether sugar may have some resurgence in the market.

Any increased use of sugar would be good news for three companies in the region — American Crystal Sugar Co., a farmer-owned cooperative in Moorhead, Minn., has five factories that produce granulated sugar from sugar beets. Minn-Dak Farmers Co-op of Wahpeton, N.D., has another factory, and still another is at Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Co-op of Renville, Minn.

It would take a lot for this to represent a significant trend. Per capita, U.S. refined sugar deliveries are about 62 ponds per person per year, while high-fructose corn syrup deliveries on an equal basis is about 56 pounds.

Health myths?

While HFCS has accumulated some negative press for its purported influence to make diabetes worse, scientists are saying otherwise.

One nationally known expert is John S. White, a biochemist from Illinois and founder of White Technical Research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and the Journal of Nutrition. He’s worked with the beverage industry and who says flatly that there is “no nutritional advantage to substituting sugar” for high-fructose corn syrup.

White says sweeteners only accounts for about 10 percent of the calories, while the human studies of fructose increased that to 15 percent to 30 percent, and animal took it as high as 60 percent to 65 percent.

Ample studies in the past few years demonstrate no metabolic differences between the two, and how they’re handled in the body, White says.

“The body can’t tell whether what you’re drinking contains one or the other,” he says. “The idea of substituting sugar for high-fructose corn syrup is simply a marketing decision. There’s no science to substantiate it.”

White also sees the promotion of “natural” as “a ruse, an exaggerated construct that is argued by many who are not familiar with the realities of things.”

“I defy you to put a sugar beet in a glass of water and call that a good sweetener. I defy you to put sugar cane in a glass of water, just as you can’t put corn in a glass of water” and sweeten it.

“These are all botanical products and they all require a certain amount of refining to produce a sweetener that is suitable for use.”

White says that to say sugar is a natural product is “useful to the sugar industry” but “doesn’t reflect the realities of the production of these things.” He notes that high-fructose corn syrup satisfied the Food and Drug Administration regulation for “natural” labeling about a year ago.

Sweet chemistry

White says he’s seen the concept that high-fructose corn syrup is sweeter than sugar, but he says “that is also a myth.” He notes that in the initial conversions of soda pop beverages from sugar to corn sweetener that took place in the 1980s, “great pains were taken to make sure that both high-fructose corn syrup and sugar had the same sweetness.” The companies ran taste panels with consumers and did their own research until they were “convinced the formulations didn’t taste different,” he says.

He says there may be “some individuals” who can taste differences between high-fructose corn syrup and sugar-sweetened products, but they’d have to be “trained in flavor to discern the difference.” He says there may be people who have memories of how things tasted when they were young, but, “Memories of when we were children fade with time.”

Further, there is the biochemical issue.

Both high-fructose corn syrup and sugar are similar in that both have about half “fructose” and half “glucose.”

“Sucrose,” or sugar, is a disaccharide — with the two sugars linked together.

In high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose and glucose are separated, as monosaccharides.

“Some say this is an important difference, but before sucrose can be absorbed into the blood stream, the two are apart — they are identical,” White says. “That’s what’s in the blood. That’s what the body has to handle.”

When a soft drink is made out of sugar, the bonds are complete.

But as it usually takes a month or two before the product is consumed, and by that time the bond is broken.

Typically, soft drink has a fairly low pH, meaning it is more acidic than basic.

“It has some phosphoric or citric acid in it, and the pH is low enough so the acid breaks the bond between the

fructose and glucose,” White says. “This takes place over time, and the warmer the storage is, the more complete that is. Essentially, as this bond is hydrolyzed, you get the fructose and glucose as ‘free’ sugars, which is essentially the same as high-fructose corn syrup. This is another reason to believe there is no nutritional advantage for sugar.”

Meanwhile, high-fructose corn syrup is likelier to taste the same on day 30 as they do when they’re made.

White says any of the sweeteners are designed to “give sweetness only” and “don’t taste like either corn or sugar cane.”

Utility, other factors

One of the clear advantages of high-fructose corn syrup in certain food products is that it is “already a liquid product,” White says. “It is very well-suited to soft drinks. If you receive granular sugar, you have to get that into solution in order to make your product. And it takes more energy and manpower to do that than with high-fructose corn syrup.”

High-fructose corn syrup is about 20 percent water, and a liquid syrup can be off-loaded from a rail car using pumps.

White says it is interesting that corn fructose was initially intended to be a liquid sweetener alternative to sugar. “In that respect you might call it corn ‘sugar.’ You’ve got beet and cane.”

In the same way, beet and cane sugar has some functional advantages.

Pepsi isn’t the only company promoting sugar in its products, as opposed to high-fructose corn syrup.

Andy Briscoe of The Sugar Association in Washington says his organization has a list of 100 products that feature sugar, as opposed to corn syrup.

He points to Dublin Dr. Pepper of Dublin, Texas, markets its products with “pure cane sugar.” There are stories about U.S. distributors who handle “Mexican Coke,” which some immigrants are nostalgic for, and some customers think taste better.

Briscoe says the “natural” label is a key to the success of sugar. Sugar still is a little costlier than high-fructose corn syrup, but pricing is closer than ever before.

One of the marketers featuring sugar is Jones Soda Co., of Seattle. The company markets products under the Jones Soda, Jones Pure Cane Soda and other brands. The specialty products are sometimes priced as a premium, and do well in the Midwest, Northwest and eastern Canada, says Conor Gentes, an assistant brand manager for the company.

Gentes says his products have been doing, but says the sugar content is “just an overall preference.”

“There’s not really a whole lot of science saying high-fructose corn syrup is any different on your body than pure cane,” he says. “It’s just something we prefer to do.”

He also says there is no particular rationale for using cane sugar vs. beet sugar. “It’s just something we prefer to do.”