Coca-Cola Sucks Up to Trump With a New MAHA-Friendly Version
The company announced it was creating a new product with cane sugar.
tasos katopodis/Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Coca-Cola announced it will launch an American version of “Mexican Coke” after President Donald Trump urged the company to use real cane sugar in its signature product.
“As part of its ongoing innovation agenda, this fall in the United States, the company plans to launch an offering made with U.S. cane sugar to expand its Trademark Coca-Cola product range,” the company wrote Tuesday in a press release announcing its second-quarter earnings.
The new product won’t replace the current version, which uses high-fructose corn syrup.
“This addition is designed to complement the company’s strong core portfolio and offer more choices across occasions and preferences,” the company said.
President Trump is a vocal fan of Diet Coke, which uses the sweetener aspartame.
JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS
Many Coke drinkers have long preferred Coca-Cola made with real sugar, which is produced in Mexico—the country with which most Americans associate “real” Coke—and Western Europe.
Trump wrote on social media last week that, “I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so. I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them—You’ll see. It’s just better!”
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As a sign of how popular Mexican Coke is even among Americans, the president posted the announcement as his followers were angry over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, apparently hoping his base would consider it good news.
The Atlanta-based soft drink giant did not immediately confirm the change, saying only that more details would be “shared soon.”
President Donald Trump drinks so much Diet Coke that he had a "Coke button" installed in the Resolute Desk to summon it.
Pool/Getty Images
Its Tuesday announcement did not provide an exact launch date or other product details, nor did it say where the idea to introduce a real-sugar product originated.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has said that “sugar is poison” but has suggested that high-fructose corn syrup—which he has repeatedly blasted as a driver of obesity and diabetes—is even worse, The Washington Post reported.
After diner chain Steak ‘n Shake announced that it would begin offering Coca-Cola with real cane sugar in glass bottles, Kennedy wrote in a social media post that, “MAHA is winning,” a reference to his “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
He had said during a 2023 interview with The Breakfast Club radio show that if people wanted to drink Coca-Cola, they should drink Mexican Coke.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called sugar "poison" but said that real-sugar Coca-Cola was a victory for his "Make America Healthy Again" movement.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
After Trump’s announcement last week, the company thanked the president for his “enthusiasm” but also defended its use of high-fructose corn syrup, saying the product “has about the same number of calories per serving as table sugar and is metabolized in a similar way by your body.”
The Corn Refiners Association also said in a statement that replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar would “cost thousands of American food manufacturing jobs, depress farm income, and boost imports of foreign sugar, all with no nutritional benefit.”
Some studies, however, have found that countries that use high-fructose corn syrup in their food supplies had a 20 percent higher prevalence of diabetes than countries did not use it.
That higher prevalence occurred independently of sugar intake and obesity levels, a 2012 study by the University of Southern California and University of Oxford found.
Coke produced in the U.S. contained high-fructose corn syrup.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle
Other research has found that high-fructose corn syrup isn’t “intrinsically” worse than sugar, according to Michael Pollan, the popular science journalist who first took on high-fructose corn syrup in the early 2000s.
The problem is that it’s cheaper than sugar, so it’s often added to foods that are supposed to be savory, Pollan clarified in a 2011 talk. America’s obesity epidemic was the result of refined carbohydrates and added sugar more broadly, he added.
In the context of Coca-Cola, soda is still terrible for you whether it’s made with sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, public health experts told the Post.
But Mexican Coke has a deeper, more dimensional sweetness and tastes more natural than the American version, according to some drinkers. American Coke is “flat” and “syrupy,” with a “lingering aftertaste,” they say.
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