"Headquartered in Colorado, Western Sugar is a grower-owned cooperative including about 1,000 American sugar beet farmers in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana."

Because Beets are sugar, and corn is not?

Because HFCS is not sugar, period. It's deceptive labeling, designed to do an end-run around the fact that people have started recognizing HFCS as being unhealthy.

Chemically, fructose is a sugar. It's not sucrose ("table sugar") and it's not glucose, but it is a sugar. There are plenty of other sugars. HFCS is a combination of fructose and glucose in varying proportions, with a small amount of other sugars included.

When sucrose is in a weakly acid environment (eg your digestive tract) it breaks down 50:50 into fructose and glucose and these are actually what are digested. Commercial HFCS tends to be 42:53:5 fructose:glucose:other_sugars (HFCS42) or 55:41:4 (HFCS55 - used in carbonated drinks).
For comparison, honey is around 50:44:5:1 (fructose:glucose:other:sucrose)


So, from a chemical perspective, HFCS is a combination of sugars, and the same sugars already present in your existing "sugar" (brown sugar has a 1% fructose, 1% other sugar component).

This is the claim made by HFCS marketing; your body breaks down the sucrose into fructose and glucose and that's what is actually digested; HFCS just has the same stuff in it. They don't comment that the proportions are different...

Note: I make no comment as to whether HFCS is good or bad for you; that's a different argument entirely. I also make no comment about marketing and brand relaunches; these are also different arguments. I'm merely pointing out that chemically, there could be an argument for marketing HFCS as "sugar".