After President Trump announced that Coke will be made with cane sugar in the U.S., as it is in Mexico, foodies of Mexican heritage said in interviews that they weren’t excited.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WGHP) — A Mount Airy man was sentenced Friday for his alleged role in a cattle theft scheme targeting North Carolina stockyards and farms, according to the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina. In August 2024, William Dalton Edwards, 26, pleaded guilty to “conspiring to defraud the United States and […]

President Donald Trump stirred up social media Wednesday with a bold claim: Coca-Cola is about to ditch high‑fructose corn syrup in favor of real cane sugar, just like the beloved Mexican version.

President Trump said on Wednesday that he had spoken to the Coca-Cola Company about using “REAL cane sugar in Coke” in the United States and that the company had agreed to begin adding it. A spokeswoman for Coca-Cola would not comment on whether it had agreed to do so.

However, what Trump neglected to mention in his post is that the country most closely associated with the tastier Coke is one of his most frequent scapegoats: Mexico. “Mexican Coke” is made with real sugar, a distinction which has been maintained by an ongoing trade war over sugar between the U.S. and Mexico that predates Trump’s tariff tantrums.

Does Coca-Cola made with cane sugar — aka Mexican Coke — really taste better than the U.S. version made with high-fructose corn syrup, as President Donald Trump claims? Not quite, according to some studies.

To produce one pound of HFCS, the industry uses around 2.5 pounds of corn, so a large shift in corn syrup use in the U.S. would hurt demand for the cereal, hurting corn growers, while probably boosting imports of cane sugar since there is not enough produced in the U.S. to satisfy American consumers' sweet tooth.

As investors prepped for Coke’s cane-sugar future, corn syrup producers Archer-Daniels-Midland and Ingredion both saw their shares fizzle.