Farm to Treat: Celebrating Our Farmers During National Candy Month

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Every June, we celebrate the official start of summer alongside National Candy Month. Candy – in all its delightful forms – brightens smiles, livens celebrations, and serves as a small pleasure in our daily lives.

These treats certainly have a way of making our lives more delicious, and we’re thrilled to join in the sweetness by highlighting the important role American sugar producers play in making National Candy Month possible.

So, let’s celebrate the treats we love and the policies and people who make them possible, too. Our sugarbeet and sugarcane farmers and producers work day-in and day-out to provide the high-quality, made-in-America sugar that is the hallmark of your favorite treat and an essential ingredient in so many other foods.

     

This is all made possible by a strong U.S. sugar policy. In fact, a study conducted by economists at the University of Tennessee analyzed the profits and risk of the confectionary industry and found that the high profitability and low volatility of the industry can be attributed, in part, to U.S. sugar policy. That’s because U.S. sugar policy provides a reliable supply of domestically produced sugar and the flexibility to ensure that supply always meets demand. Talk about sweet! 

Sugarbeet and sugarcane farmers are key to keeping candy manufacturing lines humming, but like many other farmers, they are facing significant headwinds due to persistently high input costs and weather challenges from Mother Nature. To keep the Made-in-America sugar flowing, farmers need a strong, bipartisan five-year Farm Bill that delivers a strengthened safety net for sugar producers.

While we savor our favorite treats, let’s also indulge in some facts: 

  • The sugar industry contributes $23.3 billion to the U.S. economy every single year.
  • Thanks to U.S. sugar policy in the Farm Bill, American farmers and workers supply 70-75% of America’s sugar needs.
  • U.S. sugar policy ensures that we always have sugar available—every year there are over 3 billion pounds of surplus sugar.
  • Sugar creates more than 151,000 U.S. jobs in more than two dozen states.
  • And all that comes at zero-cost to taxpayers and an affordable cost to consumers.

Americans prefer made-in-America sugar 8 to 1, so let’s keep our farms here instead of offshoring our production. That way we can keep celebrating National Candy Month year after year.