<P> The Pepsi - Cola Made with Real Sugar, formerly called Throwback, is a brand of soft drink sold by PepsiCo in the United States and in sweet stores in South Australia for its flagship Pepsi and Mountain Dew brands . The drinks, called Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback, are named as such because they are flavored with cane sugar and beet sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup, which soft drink companies used to replace sugar (in their North American products) in the 1980s . In addition, these drinks use retro packaging . As of June 2014, Pepsi Throwback has been replaced in one area of the United States by "Pepsi - Cola Made with Real Sugar", a new product formulation, also made without high fructose corn syrup . </P> <P> The cost of sugar in the US started to rise in the late 1970s and into the 1980s due to government imposed tariffs, prompting soft drink manufacturers to switch to high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as a cheaper alternative to sugar . (Diet drinks were not included, because they have long been flavored with artificial sweeteners; the switch from saccharin to aspartame around the same time was an unrelated move .) By the mid-1980s, all of the major soft drink brands switched to HFCS for their North American products, with the original formula of Coca - Cola being one of the last holdouts . In most countries, sugar is still used rather than HFCS . </P>

When did pepsi change from sugar to corn syrup