LONDON—It's not this year's price crash that haunts the $150 billion sugar industry. It's the fear of worse to come.
Raw sugar's 16 percent drop ranks it in the bottom of the 22 raw materials on the Bloomberg Commodity Index. Shocks to demand in top consumer India and prospects of more European supply are helping shift the market to a surplus, hurting prices. Yet beyond such market dampeners hang darker clouds.
After decades of stable demand growth, almost doubling per person since 1960, the world is heading for a tipping point as shoppers turn against the cola and candy blamed for an obesity epidemic in the rich world. At the same time, sugar has to compete with cheap syrups increasingly used in processed food.
Demand is rising by some estimates at the slowest rate since at least the global financial crisis as companies like Coca-Cola Co., consuming about 14 percent of all sugar traded, and Nestle SA, the world's biggest food company, react to such trends. Group Sopex and Green Pool Commodity Specialists see growth in 2017-18 below the average 2 percent a year of the last decade or so. The U.S. Department of Agriculture sees the first drop in demand in a quarter century.
"Growth is not what it's been," Tom McNeill, managing director of Green Pool, said in an interview. "There is undoubtedly a move by global bottlers and by a lot of global food manufacturers to reduce the sugar content in their products."
Consumption may sink below 1 percent for a second year in the 2016-17 season, less than half the average pace in the previous decade, Sopex figures show. The slowdown may mark a turning point for an industry that's seen near linear growth for half a century on an expanding world population and rising wealth, concentrated most recently in dynamic economies like China.
Source: www.philly.com