By Dan Charles
Sugar, you might think, is just sugar, no matter where it comes from. But not anymore.
About half of all sugar in the U.S. comes from sugarbeets, and the other half comes from sugarcane. Now, for the first time, sugar traders are treating these as two different commodities, with two different prices.
It's all because about eight years ago, nearly all the farmers who grow sugarbeets in the United States decided to start growing genetically modified versions of their crop. The GMO beets, which can tolerate the weedkiller glyphosate, otherwise known as Roundup, made it easier for them to get rid of weeds.
They really didn't expect any problems.
I interviewed David Berg, president of the American Crystal Sugar Co., about this change in 2008. "Most of our buyers, the people who buy sugar for industrial uses—as an ingredient in cereals and candies and baked goods and things like that—they've not expressed big concerns about it," Berg said. "We have not come across any specific place where we're under any constraints where we can't sell our sugar."
Just in the past two years, though, that's changed. Many food companies have decided to label their products as non-GMO. And because practically all sugarbeets in the U.S. are genetically modified, those food products are now using sugar derived from sugarcane grown in Florida, Louisiana or outside the U.S. There isn't any genetically modified sugarcane.
Deborah Arcoleo, director of product transparency at the Hershey Co., told me that in 2015, "we started reformulating Hershey's Kisses, Hershey's milk chocolate, and Hershey's milk chocolate with almonds, to move from beet sugar to cane sugar, and that's complete. Now we're looking to do that across the rest of our portfolio, to the extent that we can."
Hershey's is one of the top sugar users in the country, and other companies have made similar moves. It's been a jolt for American Crystal, which is mainly in the sugarbeet business.
Source: www.npr.org