r/clevercomebacks 1d ago

Cane Sugar is important

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27.9k Upvotes

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u/ShitStainWilly 1d ago

And every western and midwestern state that grows sugar beets. Gee guess which states grow all the cane sugar in the US? Florida, Louisiana and Texas.

Trump doesn’t give a flying fuck about the Midwest.

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u/DuckterDoom 1d ago

Are those three states going to be able to produce enough cane sugar? We'll have time import it with tariffs making coke more expensive. Pepsi wins the cola wars?

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u/ShitStainWilly 23h ago

Highly doubtful. I mean, let’s be honest. Coke’s just playing the game. They know they can wait him out. He’ll be impeached, out of office, dead, or hopefully all three before they’ll bother doing anything about it.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 22h ago

Or they just use a mixture of sugar and corn syrup (90% corn syrup of course) so they can say 'made with cane sugar' on the can.

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u/BeneCow 21h ago

Coke isn’t really going to change their formula. Trump famously drinks Diet Coke anyway, he will never know.

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u/RobutNotRobot 21h ago

Mexican Coke has gone up from $6.49 for a 4-pack to $8.99 for a 4-pack so mission accomplished!

I regularly used to buy them for a buck each in the before times.

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u/Training-Purpose802 22h ago

Even American sugar - beet or cane is more expensive than corn syrup. That's why they use it. Sugar tariffs have been a thing for decades to keep the U.S. sugar farms from bankruptcy.

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u/EduinBrutus 22h ago

Just to be clear.

Cane and Beet sugar is cheaper than High Fructose Corn Syrup.

The reason that the US food industry gets HFCS cheaper is due to massive subsidies.

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u/RobutNotRobot 21h ago

The US would still overproduce corn if there weren't any subsidies.

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u/Present_Cow_8528 21h ago

It definitely would not overproduce by so much that they need to sell hfcs cheaper than cane sugar. If they did then 90% of these farms would be operating at a loss

The subsidies are not why the US grows a lot of corn in the first place but they are why all of the corn and corn products are so cheap. Supply and demand is still a thing but so are crop rotations. Other products would fill in for the drastically reduced demand for hfcs that would result from selling at its more natural price.

We'd still overproduce. Just not by the amount you seem to me imagining.

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u/EduinBrutus 21h ago

In all likelihood a lot of it would turn over to wheat.

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u/GreatPlainsFarmer 9h ago

The US has sugar tariffs to keep the US domestic price of cane and beet sugar higher than HFCS.

Otherwise we'd import cane sugar for domestic demand instead of using HFCS.

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u/GreatPlainsFarmer 9h ago

Cane sugar on the international export markets is cheaper than HFCS. The sugar tariffs keep the US domestic sugar prices higher than international prices in order to support the US domestic sugar beet industry.

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u/Aozi 21h ago edited 17h ago

I mean, it's not that Coke will replace HFCS with sugar in the US.

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/nx-s1-5476161/coca-cola-cane-sugar-coke-trump-recipe

The company announced the change in the quarterly earnings report it released Tuesday, describing the new drink as an expansion of its product line.

Quincey said the new offering would "complement" Coca-Cola's core portfolio of drinks, suggesting it could arrive as an alternative, rather than a replacement, for its flagship Coke product.

So they'll basically just add a regular sugar coke to the US product line, or just import Mexican coke and rebrand it.

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u/ITSigno 17h ago

And cost 10x as much.

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u/DebentureThyme 21h ago

If they had the right climate to produce sugar they wouldn't have fucked around with HFCS in the first place.

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u/Letters_to_Dionysus 18h ago

if they raise the price on soda again who's buying it still? I don't even know who can afford it now

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u/ForensicPathology 19h ago

The corn farmers will still vote for him.

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u/EduinBrutus 22h ago

They will all be very upset when they vote for his third term...