High-Fructose Corn Syrup

High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is an extra sweet, inexpensive sweetener used mostly in soft drinks and fruit juices.

HFCS is a sweetener made from corn, not the plants typically associated with sweetness like sugar cane and sugar beets, which give table sugar or sucrose.

It is made by milling corn into corn starch, then processing the corn starch into corn syrup, which is almost entirely composed of the sugar known as glucose. The resulting sweetener could be purified to 90 percent fructose, a product that is much sweetener than glucose or sucrose.

There are two forms of HFCS, known as HFCS 55 and HFCS 42, with the number denoting the percentage of fructose or ‘fruit sugar’.

HFCS 55 has sweetness equivalent to sucrose and is found mostly in beverages whereas HFCS 42 is less sweet and used primarily in baked goods also in many fruit-flavored noncarbonated beverages.
High-Fructose Corn Syrup

History of HFCS in soft drinks

Today, glucose is corn syrup is converted to fructose enzymatically, the resulting corn syrup is much sweeter. The development of high fructose corn syrup can be traced back to 1811 when the Russian chemist Kirchoff reported his discovery that starch yielded a sweet substance when heated with acid.

These experiments established the basis for the commercial production of starch syrup and crude starch sugars. High Fructose Corn Syrup was patented by Takasaki and Tanabe in 1966.

The Clinton Corn Processing Co in Clinton, Iowa first commercialized the production of High Fructose Corn Syrup in 1967.

Sugar prices rose during the 1970s, and food and beverage manufacturers began to replace cane sugar sucrose with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). In 1975 Coca-Cola started using HFCS for 25% of the sweetener in fruit-flavored beverages. Although HFCS was inexpensive to produce, sugar was a relatively cheap community at the time.

In 1982, Congress enacted the Sugar Price Stabilization Law, which placed strict limit of the amount of sugar that could be imported into the United States. The law was ostensibly intended to protect domestic sugar producers from foreign competition.

The rice of sugar began to climb, and the food industry became the rise of HFCS in the food supply.

In November 1984, both Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola announced on the same day that they planned to replace refined sugar with HFCS in their regular and caffeine-free soft drinks. By 1992, HFCS had become a major component of all major soft drinks.
History of HFCS in soft drinks

What is high fructose corn syrup?

Chemically, the enzyme isomerase is use to covert some of the glucose in the corn syrup into another sugar, fructose.

High fructose corn syrup is a combination of glucose and fructose. High fructose corn syrup is an extra sweet, inexpensive sweetener used mostly in soft drinks and fruit juice. Since its debut in the 1970s, its used has grown in popularity within the food industry.

Production of high fructose corn syrup involves milling corn to produce corn starch and then hydrolyzing the starch to glucose using the enzymes alpha-amylase and glucoamylase.

The glucose so produced is then treated with the enzyme glucose isomerase to produce a mixture of glucose and fructose.

High fructose corn syrup contains 45% fructose and 55% glucose and has the same sweetness as sugar.

By further refining the proportion of fructose can be increased to 55% fructose, 45% glucose. The resulting product, called high fructose corn syrup 55 is slightly sweeter than sugar. High fructose corn syrup is found mostly in beverages.

Some consumers and health professional are concerned about the impact that the widespread use of high fructose corn syrup has on human health. Some believe there may be relationship between consumption of high fructose corn syrup and obesity.
What is high fructose corn syrup?

History of High Fructose Corn Syrup in Soft Drinks

The first corn syrup in the United States was produced in Buffalo, New York, in 1866. A major breakthrough occurred in 1967 with the patenting of an enzymatic process to convert dextrose to fructose, a 6 carbon sugar that is sweeter tasting than sucrose.

Americans began producing starch sugar from cornstarch instead of potato starch. Its cheaper than table sugar.

In 1971, food scientist in Japan found a way to produce a cheaper sweetener from corn. HFCS began to appear in frozen foods to protect against freezer burn and in vending machine products to preserve taste.

In United States HFCS became an important player in the sweetener market among sugar substitutes. Production of HFCS has increased from 51,000 mt in 1970 to nearly 8.7 million mt in 2001.

HFCS was first introduced to the beverages industry in the early 1970s. Improvements in quality encouraged parent soft drink companies to allow HFCS to replace sucrose as the primary nutritive sweetener.

In the 1980s, both Coke and Pepsi switched from a fifty-fifty blend of sugar and corn syrup to 100 percent HFCS, saving them 20 percent in sweetener costs.

By 1992, HFCS had become a major component of all major soft drinks.

HFCS is a cheaper and attractive alternative, especially for products of soft drinks who are major users of sweeteners.

Beverages sweetened with HFCS account for 80% of added sugar in the US diet and account for 80% of the recent increases in calorific intake of the global diet.

HFCS -55 has sweetness equivalent to sucrose and is used in carbonated soft drinks in the USA – such as cola.
History of High Fructose Corn Syrup in Soft Drinks