©MAKSYMOWICZ – STOCK.ADOBE.COM
By Ron Sterk
April 6, 2021
HFCS history shows challenges, perseverance
Corn derivative remains second most popular caloric sweetener
©MAKSYMOWICZ – STOCK.ADOBE.COM
High-fructose corn syrup came on the market in the late 1960s as a low-cost alternative to sugar and experienced tremendous growth for the next 30 years. Then came controversial research and biased news reports that turned the public’s perception negative and sent consumption into a decades-long slide that continues today, with the added challenge of overall caloric sweetener reduction. Is there a long-term future for HFCS? Based on its history, it’s a bit early to count it out.
This centennial article will examine the history, challenges and future of HFCS, a product that has been an important ingredient for the grain-based foods industry for half a century. First, the ground rules defining HFCS in a hopefully simplified explanation.
Chemists Richard O. Marshall and Earl R. Kooi first produced HFCS in 1957 when they created the enzyme glucose isomerase, which rearranged the composition of glucose in corn syrup, with the first patent granted in 1960 to the Corn Products Refining Co. (which later became CPC and then Ingredion Inc.). Little did they know what a firestorm they had created — one that would include corporate intrigue, questionable science, bad journalism and lawsuits as the result of their discovery proliferated the food processing industry. Despite that, 50 years later HFCS remains the second-most-used caloric sweetener after sugar in the United States.
Several types of HFCS are available in the marketplace, with HFCS55 produced in the greatest volume, used predominantly in soft drinks, and HFCS42, used in processed foods, including baked foods, cereals, dairy products and other applications. HFCS with fructose content as high as 95% is available but not widely used in food applications. HFCS is naturally liquid, although crystalized forms are available.
HFCS is derived from the starch of field corn, which makes up about 80% of the kernel. In the corn wet milling process, the starch is broken down into individual glucose molecules, first becoming regular corn syrup (glucose). Then, a series of enzymatic processes (including the key isomerization) convert some of the glucose to fructose. HFCS55 consists of 55% fructose and about 45% glucose and HFCS42 consists of 42% fructose and 58% glucose. HFCS55 is made by combining HFCS42 and HFCS90 in the right amounts to get 55% fructose.
The amounts of fructose in HFCS are not that different from regular sugar (sucrose), derived from crystalizing juice of sugarcane or sugar beets, which is 50% fructose and 50% glucose and has been around for centuries. Invert sugar, made from sucrose, is 45% fructose, 45% glucose and 10% unhydrolized sucrose. Honey is about 48% fructose and 52% glucose. “Regular” corn syrup is 100% glucose. Concentrations of fructose over 50% make HFCS sweeter than sugar, but not as sweet as many expect. The word “high” in high-fructose corn syrup is somewhat of a misnomer, especially in the case of HFCS42, which is only about 92% as sweet as sugar.
The main differences between sucrose and HFCS, according to the Food and Drug Administration, is that HFCS contains water. Both glucose and fructose are monosaccharides. In sucrose a chemical bond joins glucose and fructose molecules that are broken down rapidly by stomach acids. HFCS has no such chemical bond joining glucose and fructose, thus it’s a disaccharide. That difference, and how the body subsequently processes sucrose, glucose and fructose has fueled much of the debate surrounding HFCS. Adding to the debate is the fact that HFCS is “manufactured” rather than occurring naturally in the corn kernel, unlike sugar that occurs naturally in beets and cane. The “natural” debate continues today, in part because the FDA has never defined what constitutes a “natural” food. Most agree that once broken down, the human body processes the basic molecules in the same way whether from sugar or HFCS.
Also important is that nearly all caloric sweeteners have about four calories per gram, whether HFCS, sugar, honey, agave or other sweeteners.
HFCS jumped in popularity in the late 1970s when sugar prices skyrocketed to more than 70¢ a lb. The Coca-Cola Co.’s use of HFCS to replace sugar in the 1980s to cut costs while it was battling No. 2 Pepsi-Cola was dramatized in The History Channel’s “Cola Wars” segment of “The Food That Built America” series, which aired as recently as March.
“Beverage manufacturers were looking for alternatives to high sugar prices,” said Craig Ruffolo, vice president, McKeany-Flavell Co.
Coca-Cola was locked in a battle with the Pepsi-Cola Co. in the 1970s. Pepsi’s famous “Pepsi Challenge” that showed consumers preferred the sweeter, slightly more syrupy taste of Pepsi over Coke in blind taste tests allowed Pepsi to begin taking market share from Coke, although Coca-Cola always has led in sales. Coca-Cola then embarked on several changes in the 1980s, including the release of Diet Coke in 1982, still the most popular diet soda. Then chief executive officer Roberto Gouzueta led Coca-Cola to switch from sugar to HFCS55 for cost savings.
“HFCS had been around for five or six years but had not received that much attention,” said Kyd Brenner, an agricultural trade consultant who was an employee and vice president of the Corn Refiners Association from 1975 to 2000. “High sugar prices spurred the interest of big food companies.”
Coca-Cola first used HFCS in some minor brands in the 1970s, but then phased in use in its flagship brand in the 1980s.
The History Channel also noted that “the switch to corn syrup opened the door for bigger changes to the original Coke’s recipe.” What followed was the famously disastrous release of reformulated “New Coke” in 1985, which included a new formulation in addition to HFCS. A consumer “uprising” prompted Coca-Cola to bring back the old formula as “Coca-Cola Classic” just three months after the release of New Coke, but the classic remained sweetened by HFCS.
“HFCS production capacity had built up and the food industry knew how to use it by the early 1980s,” Mr. Brenner said.
In addition to lower price, Mr. Ruffolo noted that HFCS offered other key benefits — adequate supply and uniformity. The product was derived from field corn, the most widely grown crop in the United States, and the manufacturing process ensured a uniform final product no matter the supplier.
Domestic deliveries of HFCS for food and beverage use, based on data from the US Department of Agriculture, went from zero in 1967 to a high of 63.8 lbs per person in 1999, compared to sugar at 98.5 lbs per person in 1967 (reaching an all-time high of 102.3 lbs in 1972) falling to 66.4 lbs in 1999, less than a pound more than HFCS. Total per capita deliveries of caloric sweeteners were 114.2 lbs in 1967 and peaked at 151.6 lbs in 1999.
Sosland Publishing Co. began reporting HFCS prices in the mid-1980s.
“Success breeds contempt,” actor Samuel L. Jackson said in 2016, referring to rivals Marvel and DC Comics in adapting comics to movies, a statement not unlike “familiarity breeds contempt,” stated by Mark Twain and others throughout the years.
HFCS certainly had become successful and familiar, at least in the food industry from 1967 to 1999.
While HFCS use was growing rapidly, obesity rates also were shooting skyward. As the two trends were occurring nearly simultaneously, some were quick to point a finger at HFCS as the reason Americans were getting fatter. Several early scientific studies initially “confirmed” the connection, while others subsequently showed no causal effect.
“HFCS was a disruptive technology,” Mr. Brenner said. “There was a fear of the unknown. Sucrose had been ‘the’ sweetener for hundreds of years.”
There were some early challenges to HFCS that never gained traction, he pointed out, but those challenges “returned with a vengeance” in the early 2000s.
The attacks on HFCS especially gained attention in 2004 when George A. Bray, MD, a professor of medicine at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and Barry M. Popkin, PhD, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published a hypothesis that HFCS was a direct causative factor in obesity, based on the relation between the growth of HFCS consumption and increased obesity rates between 1960 and 2000.
“Even the two scientists who first propagated the idea of a unique link between high-fructose corn syrup and America’s soaring obesity rates have gently backed off from their initial theories,” The New York Times said in a significant article titled “A Sweetener With a Bad Rap” in 2006.
“It was a theory meant to spur science, but it’s quite possible that it may be found out not to be true,” Dr. Popkin was quoted as saying in The Times’ story.
The New York Times also noted that Michael F. Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and a common critic of the food industry, “never supported the notion that high-fructose corn syrup was a unique contributor to obesity,” although he said HFCS was artificial because it was created by a change in molecular structure rather than occurring naturally.
But the “cat was out of the bag” with the Bray/Popkin paper, and what followed was a “feeding frenzy” of activists, journalists and even parts of the sugar industry portraying the evils of HFCS. Some detractors went beyond blaming corn refiners to blame “cheap corn” that they claimed was heavily subsidized by the US government. Numerous studies would follow discounting the initial theory from Dr. Bray and Dr. Popkin, but none reversed the negative perception of HFCS.
Despite the “warning” signs against HFCS in the 1980s, “the industry had to scramble to assemble good and factual information,” said Mr. Brenner, who was a consultant for the CRA during the 2000s.
Further complicating matters for HFCS was a slowdown in use after years of sustained rapid growth.
“With or without the attacks, HFCS use was going to hit a peak,” Mr. Brenner said. “HFCS has been a mature product since 2000.”
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The attacks on HFCS especially gained attention in 2004 when George A. Bray, MD, a professor of medicine at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and Barry M. Popkin, PhD, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published a hypothesis that HFCS was a direct causative factor in obesity, based on the relation between the growth of HFCS consumption and increased obesity rates between 1960 and 2000.
“Even the two scientists who first propagated the idea of a unique link between high-fructose corn syrup and America’s soaring obesity rates have gently backed off from their initial theories,” The New York Times said in a significant article titled “A Sweetener With a Bad Rap” in 2006.
“It was a theory meant to spur science, but it’s quite possible that it may be found out not to be true,” Dr. Popkin was quoted as saying in The Times’ story.
The New York Times also noted that Michael F. Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and a common critic of the food industry, “never supported the notion that high-fructose corn syrup was a unique contributor to obesity,” although he said HFCS was artificial because it was created by a change in molecular structure rather than occurring naturally.
But the “cat was out of the bag” with the Bray/Popkin paper, and what followed was a “feeding frenzy” of activists, journalists and even parts of the sugar industry portraying the evils of HFCS. Some detractors went beyond blaming corn refiners to blame “cheap corn” that they claimed was heavily subsidized by the US government. Numerous studies would follow discounting the initial theory from Dr. Bray and Dr. Popkin, but none reversed the negative perception of HFCS.
Despite the “warning” signs against HFCS in the 1980s, “the industry had to scramble to assemble good and factual information,” said Mr. Brenner, who was a consultant for the CRA during the 2000s.
Further complicating matters for HFCS was a slowdown in use after years of sustained rapid growth.
“With or without the attacks, HFCS use was going to hit a peak,” Mr. Brenner said. “HFCS has been a mature product since 2000.”
After peaking at 63.8 lbs per capita in 1999, deliveries of HFCS tumbled nearly 25% to 48.4 lbs by 2010. Sugar deliveries, meanwhile, dipped to a 17-year low of 61 lbs in 2003 and then climbed to 66 lbs in 2010. Amid the public’s growing negative perception of HFCS, the food processing industry began to reformulate HFCS out of foods (and thus off labels) and switch back to sugar or some other “natural” sweetener.
The story of HFCS may not be told without the role of the Corn Refiners Association (CRA), the Washington trade group representing and defending the industry. Leading the CRA during the most challenging years was Audrae Erickson, who was president from 2002 until 2012. She led efforts on trade and rebuffed numerous challenges accusing HFCS of being the cause of rising obesity rates in America.
The CRA has six member companies: Archer Daniels Midland Co., Cargill, Grain Processing Corp., Ingredion Inc., Roquette America, Inc., and Tate & Lyle Americas. All of those make HFCS except Grain Processing, which focuses on starch and maltodextrins. They all also produce fuel ethanol and numerous other products.
Despite its numerous challenges and victories for the industry, the CRA also had a couple missteps along the way. One was an attempt to change the name from high-fructose corn syrup to corn sugar at the height of the negative press era. The FDA rejected that attempt.
Also controversial was a print and television advertising campaign by the CRA in 2008 extolling the benefits of HFCS, or at least noting its similarities to sugar. The effect of the campaign on consumers was questionable at a cost some estimated between $20 million and $30 million.
A 2012 meta-analysis published in the Annals of Internal Medicine noted that weight gain resulted when HFCS was consumed in addition to existing daily caloric intake but not when it was consumed in place of other sugars. Thus, the key was total calories consumed, not necessarily the type of calories, and Americans were consuming lots more calories during the final decades of the 20th century and into the 2000s (while also becoming more sedentary), especially caloric-sweetened beverages, which to some, pointed the finger back at HFCS.
Whether from work by the CRA or the numerous studies countering the initial anti-HFCS research, “the effort just ran out of steam,” in the late 2000s, Mr. Brenner said. “People lost interest.”
Then there were lawsuits and counter lawsuits between the corn sweetener and sugar industries (initiated by sugar) that started around 2011, part of which focused on accusations of false advertising in the 2008 HFCS public relations campaign. The sugar industry sought $1.5 billion in damages. The CRA countered with accusations that the sugar industry was running a “spin-and-smear conspiracy” against the HFCS industry, seeking $530 million in damages. Those cases finally were settled out of court in 2015.
“The sweetener industry realized that ‘inter-sweetener warfare’ wasn’t doing anyone any good,” Mr. Brenner said.
Producers of HFCS got a reprieve of sorts with the North American Free Trade agreement in 2008. US refiners had exported between 150,000 and nearly 200,000 tonnes, dry weight basis, of total fructose (mainly HFCS55 but also some HFCS42 and crystalline fructose) to Mexico annually from 1997 through 2000 (calendar year), but those shipments plunged to a low of about 5,700 tonnes in 2003 amid challenges from Mexico’s sugar industry unhappy with the displacement of sugar used by Mexican bottlers and others. US exports recovered to about 330,000 tonnes by 2007. As in the United States, HFCS was an economical alternative to sugar in Mexico.
NAFTA opened unlimited, duty-free trade in sweeteners (mainly sugar and HFCS) between the two countries. Mexican bottlers imported HFCS to replace the large amount of sugar being exported to the United States, a far more lucrative destination for Mexico’s excess sugar than other world markets. Shipments of HFCS to Mexico jumped by 36% in 2008, the first year of the agreement respective to sweeteners, finally peaking at 1,138,750 tonnes in 2012, nearly three-and-a-half times the 2007 amount.
But it was an uneasy period for HFCS exports because sugar trade between the two countries grew more contentious over the next several years, with Mexico threatening to suspend or limit imports of US HFCS in retaliation for US sugar producers’ challenges to its large sugar exports to the United States. With unlimited, duty-free exports to the US market, Mexico boosted its sugar production, rising to a record 6,975,000 tonnes, actual weight, in 2012-13, up 37% from the prior five-year average. The influx of sugar from Mexico contributed to eight-year low prices for US sugar and culminated in US sugar producers filing anti-dumping and countervailing duty complaints against Mexico. US sugar producers prevailed in 2014, anti-dumping and countervailing duties were imposed and subsequently suspended per agreements to limit Mexico’s exports of sugar to the United States.
US exports of HFCS to Mexico took a hit as a result, but not as severely as some had feared as Mexico quickly trimmed sugar production to an average just over 6 million tonnes annually over the next five years, down 16% from the 2012-13 peak. US shipments of HFCS to Mexico dropped to 900,967 tonnes in 2014 and would build back to a recent high of 1,052,748 tonnes in 2017, when other factors began to affect both sugar and HFCS consumption in Mexico — namely sweetener taxes and a major government push to reduce consumption of added sugars.
Mexico remains by far the largest export market for US HFCS.
While cooler heads prevailed in the sweetener industry after the lawsuits were settled in 2015, problems for HFCS are far from over.
Deliveries of HFCS in the United States dropped another 25% from 48.4 lbs per person in 2010 to 36.7 lbs in 2019 (the most recent data available), according to the USDA. That’s the lowest since 31.2 lbs in 1983, when the sweetener was in the early stages of a 30-year upswing. From its peak of 63.8 lbs in 1999, per capita deliveries of HFCS in the United States declined 42% over the next 20 years, while sugar deliveries edged up 3.2% to 68.5 lbs in 2019, although it should be noted that per capita sugar deliveries have eased from a recent high of 69.8 lbs in 2016.
Cost advantages over sugar, dependable supply and other functional benefits of HFCS have helped HFCS maintain a foothold in the US and Mexican food and beverage markets. But those benefits haven’t slowed the decline in use as some food manufacturers continue to formulate away from HFCS, in part amid the clean label movement of recent years but also because of general sugar reduction. HFCS, along with sugar and soybean oil, all avoided the GMO label despite coming mostly from GMO crops, because any traits are eliminated during the refining processes.
“In the 1970s beverage manufacturers were looking for alternatives to high sugar prices,” Mr. Ruffolo said. “It’s no different today. Food manufacturers will continue to look for alternatives for price and functionality.”
Mr. Brenner agreed, noting that while HFCS is used globally, it is most widely used in the United States and Mexico, and “there remain opportunities around the world.”
And consumers are changing.
“The lines have blurred,” Mr. Ruffolo said, referring to generational changes in consumer food and beverage preferences and demands, and the “lumping of caloric sweeteners together” as total added sugars rather than HFCS or sugar. The younger generation has grown up only knowing the taste of soda sweetened with HFCS, he noted.
Meanwhile, the corn wet milling industry will adapt, he said, just as it did in the past two decades reducing HFCS production capacity to match declining demand, thus maintaining price levels because there was limited excess supply. The industry also has adjusted its marketing technique in recent years, now working mostly with buyers rather than depending as much on distributors, and pricing supply based on individual customers rather than issuing blanket pricing “letters” announcing increases.
So what lies ahead? Will the sharply declining demand picture be accelerated by the overall push to reduce added sugars? Will soda taxes, which talk about sugar but in reality mostly affect HFCS, increase and gnaw away at HFCS consumption? Despite a colorful 50-year history, HFCS remains second only to its longtime rival sugar as the caloric sweetener of preference in the United States. HFCS now may well be locked in a battle with sugar to maintain caloric sweeteners in food and beverages rather than fighting against sugar for market share.
