Here’s a food riddle: When is high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) not high-fructose corn syrup? When it’s “corn sugar.” Yes, get ready to start seeing this new, innocent-sounding moniker pop up in commercials and on labels. Because of the thrashing HFCS has taken in the court of public opinion in the past few years, its makers have decided to help it shed its old battered skin and emerge as a sleeker, more natural-sounding product.
Rebranding happens all the time in the corporate world. Philip Morris became Altria. The SciFi Channel became SyFy, GMAC became Ally Bank, Puff Daddy became Diddy, and Prince became The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. When a name—for one reason or another—just isn’t working, the strategy is to regroup and debut as something else.
You may think of foods as having fixed and immutable names, but the truth is that food products can be rebranded just as easily as any other corporation, product, or person. The latest example is the attempt by the Corn Refiners’ Association to shed the negative image of HFCS by calling it something sweet and tempting, like “corn sugar.” Some rebrandings are successful and some aren’t, but some of our most commonplace foods didn’t always go by the name they have now.
Aspartame, aka AminoSweet
Discovered in 1965, aspartame was among the first major artificial sweeteners to hit the U.S. food market, and because of its potency and lack of calories, manufacturers put it in everything. But due to competition from newer sweeteners and persistent rumors that the chemical is linked to cancerous tumors, sales of aspartame have lagged in recent years. The FDA has consistently maintained that aspartame is safe, but in early 2010, Ajinomoto (one company that manufactures the compound) decided to rename it AminoSweet. The new name is meant to make the product sound more natural and to evoke the two amino acids that account for its sweetness.
Low Erucic Acid Rapeseed Oil, aka Canola Oil
There’s no such thing as a canola. Actually, the proper spelling is “Canola” with a capital C, because Canola isn’t even a plant—it’s the proper name of the product.
