Inside Coca Cola's Sugar Supply: The Mills, the Certifiers, and the Labor Record

On April 25, 2025, Coca Cola FEMSA, the largest bottler of Coca Cola products in the world by volume, filed its annual report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Three sugar mills were named by name on page after page of that filing: PIASA, Beta San Miguel, and Ingenio La Gloria. The company disclosed, in the same document, that it holds a 36.4 percent equity stake in PIASA and a 2.7 percent stake in Beta San Miguel.

That one filing answers a question Google searches by the millions each year, and that almost no one on page one of the search results actually answers from the primary record: where does the sugar in Coca Cola come from. The answer is three sentences long, and then it opens into a longer story about certification, about country of origin, and about the September 2024 list the US Department of Labor publishes, which catalogs 204 goods from 82 countries, with sugarcane produced with child or forced labor in 14 of them. By volume, Coca Cola Europacific Partners, one of the three largest bottlers of Coca Cola in the world, reports that 80.1% of its sugar in 2024 came from suppliers compliant with its own Principles for Sustainable Agriculture, with regional spread from 99.9% in Europe to 46.9% in Asia Pacific. Everything that follows is drawn from the filings themselves, the agency pages, and the certifier's own standard. No scoring, no verdict on any company. The reader decides what matters.

What sweetener does US Coca Cola actually use?

The sweetener in a 12 ounce can of standard Coca Cola bought at a US grocery store is high fructose corn syrup, not sugar. The ingredient panel on the can lists it by name, in the second slot after carbonated water, and 21 CFR 101.4 requires that order to reflect weight. High fructose corn syrup is a liquid sweetener produced from US corn, cheaper per pound of sweetness than cane or beet sugar inside the United States for the last four decades. Coca Cola bottlers in the United States have used it since 1984.

There is one new exception. On July 22, 2025, The Coca Cola Company told investors it would launch a US cane sugar version of Coke that fall, as an addition to the existing trademark lineup. The announcement did not replace the standard formula; it added a second sweetener option in the same brand. The new product shipped in autumn 2025. Diet Coke and Coke Zero Sugar were not changed. If you want to know which version is in your can, read the ingredient line.

Who makes the sugar in Mexican Coca Cola?

The glass bottle Coca Cola imported from Mexico, often called Mexican Coke in the United States, has used cane sugar, not high fructose corn syrup, continuously as its sweetener. It is bottled in Mexico by Coca Cola FEMSA. That company's 2024 Form 20 F, filed with the SEC on April 25, 2025 and also posted on the FEMSA investor site, names its sugar suppliers in a single sentence: PIASA, Beta San Miguel, and Ingenio La Gloria, all sugar cane producers. The same filing records FEMSA's equity stakes in two of the three mills. PIASA, with FEMSA holding 36.4 percent, is a cooperative of Mexican sugar producers founded in 1988 whose website lists seven mills under its umbrella. Beta San Miguel, with FEMSA holding 2.7 percent, is a privately held Mexican sugar group with mills in Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Chiapas. Ingenio La Gloria is a single mill in central Veracruz operated independently of FEMSA. The filing does not disclose the percentage of total sugar sourced from each supplier, and FEMSA says in the same report that sugar in Mexico can also be sourced through third party distributors when the ingenios cannot cover demand.

What does the US Department of Labor say about sugarcane?

Sugarcane is one of the longer entries on the International Labor Affairs Bureau's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, which the US Department of Labor publishes under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and most recently updated in September 2024. The 2024 edition catalogs 204 goods from 82 countries. Sugarcane appears in that list across 14 countries. The Dominican Republic, India, and Brazil are three of them; the full tally also covers Belize, Bolivia, Burma, Cambodia, Colombia, Guatemala, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan, Panama, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, with the exact labor category (child, forced, or both) noted for each. The agency marks India for forced labor based on reports of debt bondage and involuntary overtime, and the Dominican Republic for forced labor in the cane sector. The list is a research product, not an enforcement action. It names the goods and countries where credible reports exist; it does not name specific brands or buyers, and inclusion does not block imports.

What the ILAB list does do is set a baseline for anyone who buys from these countries. When US Customs and Border Protection acts on forced labor it does so under separate authorities: the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and its earlier withhold release orders. CBP has not, as of this writing, issued a withhold release order against sugar sourced for Coca Cola bottlers.

What does Bonsucro certification actually certify?

The seal most often cited by Coca Cola in its sustainability materials is Bonsucro, a London based multi stakeholder initiative founded in 2008 whose production standard covers labor conditions, land rights, water use, and greenhouse gas intensity on sugarcane farms and mills. The current standard requires that certified operations prohibit forced and child labor as the ILO defines them, pay at least the legal minimum wage, allow freedom of association, and keep accident records. A certified mill is audited by an independent third party against the standard, and the audit report is lodged in Bonsucro's public certification database.

Bonsucro certification is not an organic label and does not certify the sugar itself as fair trade in the Fairtrade International sense. It is a baseline sustainability standard for sugarcane growing and processing, not a guarantee of any particular wage or price above the local legal floor. The certifier reports to industry press that certified farms show measurably higher wages and lower water use than uncertified farms, numbers that are internal to the scheme rather than audited by a US regulator.

What The Coca Cola Company and its bottlers say

The Coca Cola Company publishes a Principles for Sustainable Agriculture Supplier Guide that all agricultural suppliers of priority ingredients, sugar included, are expected to meet. The guide lists third party programs it recognizes, Bonsucro and Fairtrade International among them, and sets a 2030 target for 100 percent sustainable sourcing of its priority agricultural ingredients. In its 2024 reporting, Coca Cola Europacific Partners, one of the three largest bottlers of Coca Cola worldwide, disclosed in its Further Sustainability Information filing that 80.1 percent of its sugar in 2024 was sourced from suppliers compliant with the Principles for Sustainable Agriculture, with regional variance of 99.9 percent in Europe and 46.9 percent in Asia Pacific. Coca Cola FEMSA, in its own 2024 progress notes, told the trade press that 72 percent of its sugar by volume for 2024 came from Bonsucro certified suppliers.

Neither bottler publishes a mill by mill map of which supplier produced which share of its sugar, and Coca Cola FEMSA's 20 F says expressly that no single supplier is critical to its operations because other sources exist. The gap between the sustainability percentages, which the companies have moved up steadily since 2017, and the ILAB list, which still names sugarcane in 14 producer countries, is the gap this post has tried to describe. A buyer following its own code to the letter can still, in principle, buy sugar from a country where the agency considers the sector at risk.

What did our desk audit of the record find?

On October 2, 2026, we read Coca Cola FEMSA's FY2024 Form 20 F in full, counted the sugar suppliers it names (three mills by name, with a disclosed equity stake in two), cross referenced the countries where it bottles against the current ILAB sugarcane list, and pulled the latest Bonsucro figure from Coca Cola Europacific Partners' own 2024 filing. We also read the ingredient panel printed on a 12 ounce US can of Coca Cola Original Taste bought the same week; the second ingredient is high fructose corn syrup, consistent with every Coca Cola Original Taste can sold in the United States since 1984, with the exception of the 2025 US cane sugar variant.

The country of origin disclosure for a bottle of US cane sugar Coke is covered by a different regime than the one for Mexican Coke. In the United States, agricultural products are governed by the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service's Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) rules, but packaged food beverages like soda are outside the covered commodities list for COOL. A can need only state the manufacturer's address under FDA labeling rules, not the origin of each ingredient. If the label does not spell out where the sugar came from, that is the law working as written, not an omission.

Readers who want the parent company behind a different household category can see how we handled bathroom cleaner brands in our breakdown of the 8 companies that own familiar labels on that shelf. For a comparable look at a seal rather than a company, our write up of IFOS 5 Star certified fish oil walks through what a batch tested certification actually audits. The ingredient order rule in the first body section is the same one we unpacked for retinol in skincare, and the broader explanation of how Skinventry maps ownership to brand sits in our overview of what the app shows.

How we got these numbers

This piece draws from four kinds of primary sources, in this order. One, the SEC filings of Coca Cola bottlers (Coca Cola FEMSA's 2024 Form 20 F filed April 25, 2025 and Coca Cola Europacific Partners' sustainability filings for 2024). Two, the US Department of Labor's 2024 List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, dated September 2024. Three, The Coca Cola Company's own Principles for Sustainable Agriculture supplier guide. Four, FDA's 21 CFR 101.4 for ingredient order and USDA AMS's current Country of Origin Labeling guidance. Every number in the body of this post is linked to its source. The 72 percent Bonsucro figure for Coca Cola FEMSA was pulled from the trade press interview the company gave to that publication; the 80.1 percent Principles for Sustainable Agriculture figure comes from CCEP's own filing.

Photograph a can of soda, a bottle of juice, or a package of coffee, and Skinventry pulls up what the brand is, who owns the brand, where it is bottled, which certifications it holds, and any related records on file, each line linked to its source. Where a certifier publishes its directory, the entry is checked live; where a filing is public, the filing is linked. For the four product variants in the table above, each row would open to its own source list rather than a score.