I doubt that. Sugar and HFCS are essentially the same thing, produced in different ways. Sugar (sucrose) is a 50/50 split between glucose and fructose. HFCS has more fructose in it, generally around 65/35.

There's a danger from using too much HFCS in the replacement, but really, saying sugar is healthier than HFCS is akin to saying that it's better to be punched kickboxer than a boxer.

In the UK it still uses sugar, and imho tastes a whole lot better than the HFCS version.

Most countries still do, except the US, where we have corn subsidies and sugar tariffs to artificially lower the price of corn and artificially raise the price of sugar (to protect a few growers in the south US).

The other year when sugar prices were near equal to corn, Pepsi and Dr. Pepper distributed soda with sugar only throughout much of the United States. I haven't followed the prices of sugar since, but I would gather the price went back up either naturally or through congressional means.

The commodity price of sugar is ~1.5 cents per can of soda, so I think they could get away with it whenever they wanted (meaning that they would have canceled the products because they weren't making enough volume on them).

Now I looked it up, Pepsi markets "throwback" brands which use sugar.