Candy makers raked in $42.6 billion in sales in 2022 and collected twice the returns as the average publicly traded U.S. firm.
“It’s insulting that multi-billion-dollar corporations are posting high profits while crying poor to Congress as they try to dismantle the policy that supports American farmers like my family.
Family farms like ours across the nation work hard to provide candy and other food companies with sugar, sometimes working 24 hours a day to get the job done. Farming is volatile, unpredictable, and expensive. Farmers are essential to the nation’s food security.”
“Big Candy says that purchasing American-made sugar is a financial burden and they need unlimited cheap foreign sugar to survive, but that’s just not true. Just look at their profits! If our critics were successful in weakening the current sugar policy, my farm might not survive. Who will candy companies turn to when American sugar farmers have been driven out of business?”
These multi-billion-dollar sugar-using companies benefit from the affordable and reliable supply of American-made sugar. Yet they want Congress to help them drive American family farms and the sugar workforce out of business.
They claim it would benefit American consumers. Yet in 2013, when Mexico violated trade law and dumped their excess sugar, at prices below the cost of production, onto the American markets: candy makers reaped the benefits, consumer prices stayed the same, and American sugar farmers suffered. Some family farms, including the last sugar farms in Hawaii, shuttered.
The truth is sugar is affordable and readily available for consumers due to the robust local and regional supply chains for American-made sugar. Today, the retail price for a whole pound of sugar is half the cost of a single candy bar – adjusting for inflation, that’s less than it was a decade ago.
Multinational candymakers have outsourced candy production to other countries, such as Canada and Mexico, in order to avoid the high costs of wages and benefits in the United States.
These multi-billion-dollar sugar-using companies benefit from the affordable and reliable supply of American-made sugar. Yet they want Congress to help them drive American family farms and the sugar workforce out of business. That would put American food security at risk.
