Mark pointed something out to me this morning about high fructose corn syrup that I hadn't thought about.
I am what you might call a skeptic about HFCS.
- Yes, its availability as a cheap sweetener probably increased its use in packaged foods over the last thirty years.
- Yes, there's some dumb politics involving international tariffs and agricultural subsidies entangled with its production.
- Yes, obesity rates are correlated with HFCS rates.
- Yes, corn monoculture is an environmental problem and demand for HFCS is part of that.
- Yes, I'd rather eat "real food" on principle and so when I have the option to buy, for example, cane-sugar-sweetened ketchup, I typically do.
But I'm not strongly convinced that HFCS is really a root cause of the obesity epidemic, I am not strongly convinced that overconsumption of HFCS is significantly different from overconsumption of other sugars, and I don't treat the stuff as a special kind of poison. I think the jury is still out on it (which is reason enough for many people to avoid it altogether; fine with me; that's how I feel about soy phytoestrogens, so I get it).
Of course, right now there is a sort of a trend for companies to market "HFCS-free" stuff — I assume that consumers are getting warier of HFCS, and seeking "natural" sweeteners (like sucrose), otherwise I wouldn't be able to buy national brands of ketchup with "No High-Fructose Corn Syrup" splashed across the label in big letters. I view it as a marketing phenomenon, mostly.
So, Mark was talking to an engineer who handles pneumatic transport of dry materials, and he commented that the switchover from HFCS-sweetened products to sucrose-sweetened products is hugely, hugely expensive from a capital standpoint because of safety precautions and associated regulations. Thirty years ago when food packagers and processors decided to save money by switching from cane sugar to HFCS, the change would have been significant; but a lot has happened since then in safety regs, and surely it would be far more expensive now to switch back.
I hadn't even thought about that, but when Mark explained the conversation to me, I instantly knew what he meant.
Automated liquid handling of sugar syrups is pretty tame. You can hook your tanker truck up to a pipe and pump it right into a food plant. The stuff can sit around in tanks and be delivered via ordinary food-grade piping, controlled by fairly ordinary food-grade valves. An operator in a HFCS-handling facility isn't necessarily going to have to take extraordinary materials safety precautions when working among these pipes and valves. Whatever the risk that HFCS poses to his endocrine system when he sits down in the employee cafeteria, at least the stuff doesn't explode.
Crystalline sucrose, on the other hand, has a much more colorful history.
When you handle dry sugar, you create aerosolized sugar dust as the crystals sliding past each other knock micron-sized corners and edges off each other. Not such a big deal if you are a batch operation and your workers are slitting open bags and dumping them into a vat. But if you have automated lines and the sugar is moving by means of, say, screw conveyors or conveyor belts or pneumatic systems — as there were at the Imperial Sugar plant explosively profiled at the link — there is the potential for quite a lot of sugar dust to enter the air. Combustible, high-surface-area material + oxygenated air + equipment spark = kaboom.
So when you switch from HFCS to dry sugar, there are going to be layers of safety precautions that have to be installed to prevent your plant from blowing up, and to document that your plant is not likely to blow up. All these things cost real money — mostly capital money, since it goes into the buildings and the machines and the duct work, but also some ongoing regulatory and operating expenses. (I was going to link to some of the relevant regulations, but can't figure out how to read it without paying $37.)
So: It's not just the difference in cost-per-pound of corn syrup vs. sucrose. Handling the stuff, and meeting regulatory requirements, have different costs too.
And still, even with perfect compliance everywhere (as if!) there will be a nonzero risk every year, created by a switch from HFCS to sucrose, that some food plant somewhere will explode and kill an operator or even a bystander. Unintended consequences are everywhere, if you only look.
I would guess that the medium-sized processors have the toughest row to hoe. The giants can afford to absorb the costs of ensuring safety compliance. The small producers are morelikely to be using batch operations and are handling sugar in bags, not pneumatic transport systems. It's that "sweet spot" in the middle where it will be hard for processors to change over from HFCS to sucrose without going bankrupt or skirting anti-dust-explosion regulations.
Still, though, there's a silver lining in this for people who are eager to see the demise of HFCS. If Big Food is spending the money to switch over the lines, and is touting "HFCS-free" product on supermarket shelves, then Big Food (some of it anyway) must see the writing on the wall, or at least in the focus group, and they are betting that consumers believe there's a significant difference between the two. If you've been wondering why every food producer isn't doing the same, then maybe this is one piece of the puzzle.
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