SRA Artificial Sweetener Import Fee Squeezes Food Manufacturers

What It Means

• The SRA artificial sweetener import fee now requires a ₱25 per kilo release charge and mandatory trader registration for sucralose, aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame potassium, and stevia imports under Sugar Order No. 5.
• The charge is roughly four hundred times the ₱0.06 per kilo fee the SRA applied to alternative sweeteners just eighteen months earlier under Sugar Order No. 6.
• Food and beverage manufacturers that formulate zero sugar and diet products around these ingredients now carry a cost that the country’s sugar sweetened beverage tax law does not require, since that law already taxes cane sugar and artificial sweeteners at the same rate.
• The order arrives as the sugar industry works through an estimated ₱7.28 billion in losses tied to its own over importation under Sugar Order No. 8, while the Department of Agriculture moves to tighten sugar import policy further.
• Smaller importers and distributors without existing SRA registration face a compliance gate that larger, established players can absorb more easily.

---

The Sugar Regulatory Administration wants a cut of the artificial sweetener trade before any of it reaches a factory floor. Sugar Order No. 5, dated August 8, requires every importer of sucralose, aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame potassium, and stevia to register as an international sweetener trader with the SRA and pay ₱25 per kilo before a shipment clears for release. The SRA artificial sweetener import fee did not appear out of nowhere. It is the sharpest turn yet in a two year campaign to make artificial sweeteners costlier to bring into the country than the cane sugar they were displacing.

The SRA Artificial Sweetener Import Fee Closes a Two Year Gap

The SRA has been building toward this since September 2024, when it raised the import clearance fee on high fructose corn syrup from ₱1.50 to ₱30 per bag equivalent of sugar, a jump United Sugar Producers Federation president Manuel Lamata called overdue. Two months later, the agency floated a smaller ₱10 per bag charge on other sweeteners under tariff line 1702, describing it as a data gathering exercise rather than a regulatory move. Sugar Order No. 6, issued in February 2025, formalized that charge at ₱60 per metric ton, about six centavos per kilo. Millers and refiners backed it publicly, arguing the fee was too small to move consumer prices. The SRA artificial sweetener import fee under Sugar Order No. 5 abandons that restraint. Twenty five pesos per kilo is close to four hundred times the rate the SRA itself said would not matter eighteen months earlier.

Registration Turns Importers Into a Licensed Class

The fee is only half the order. Every importer now needs to be registered with the SRA as an international sweetener trader before a clearance application is even accepted, with a letter of application, bill of lading, commercial invoice, packing list, and certificates of origin and analysis attached. Incomplete applications will not be processed at all. That turns a customs formality into a licensing relationship, and licensing relationships favor whoever already holds one. Established importers with existing SRA registrations from the HFCS and alternative sugar regimes absorb the SRA artificial sweetener import fee as one more line item. Smaller distributors bringing in stevia or sucralose for niche health food and supplement brands now face a registration gate before they can import anything at all.

The Fee Lands Heaviest on the Most Concentrated Products

Sugar tariffs are typically measured against actual volumes of the sweet product moving through ports. Artificial sweeteners do not work that way. Sucralose is roughly six hundred times sweeter than sugar by weight, close to the multiplier the SRA itself cites to justify regulating the category. A kilo of concentrated sweetener can replace hundreds of kilos of sugar in finished products, so a flat ₱25 per kilo charge on that concentrate is not the same weight of cost as ₱25 per kilo on raw sugar. It lands as a heavier charge per unit of sweetening power delivered, which appears to be the intent. The SRA artificial sweetener import fee is not pricing the category like an ordinary import. It is pricing it like a threat to be priced out.

The Sugar Sector’s Own Numbers Explain the Urgency

The order lands on an industry still counting losses from its own missteps. Sugar Order No. 8, issued in July 2025, authorized 424,000 metric tons of refined sugar imports against an industry recommendation of just 50,000 metric tons. Those imports collided with the milling season and helped drive an estimated ₱7.28 billion in industry losses between October and December 2025. Add red striped soft scale infestation, rising input costs, and labor shortages, and the sector Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel described this week has little room left to absorb further demand loss. Tiu Laurel confirmed on August 22 that the DA is revising sugar import policy to limit future imports strictly to domestic demand, with the refined sugar ban holding through November and foreign entry resuming only next year as output is projected to decline. The SRA artificial sweetener import fee is one more lever in a supply management campaign that already includes an expanded government buying program and floor price advocacy the industry has pushed since March.

Zero Sugar Product Lines Absorb a Cost the Sin Tax Never Justified

It would be tidy to say the Sugar Sweetened Beverage tax pushed manufacturers toward artificial sweeteners and that the SRA is now correcting that distortion. The numbers do not support it. The tax under the TRAIN law charges ₱6 per liter on beverages using cane sugar and ₱6 per liter on beverages using non caloric sweeteners like sucralose or stevia. Only high fructose corn syrup carries a higher rate, at ₱12 per liter. Manufacturers who reformulated toward artificial sweeteners did it for cost per unit of sweetness and for the zero sugar positioning consumers pay a premium for, not to dodge an excise bracket that never distinguished between the two. That makes the SRA artificial sweetener import fee a pure supply side cost with no matching tax relief anywhere in the system. Beverage, ice cream, and supplement manufacturers running zero sugar lines now carry an input cost that has nothing to do with what they were taxed for reformulating in the first place.

Manuel Lamata and the sugar federations that pushed for this order will count it as a win whether or not cane sugar itself gets cheaper or more available. The fee changes the price of the alternative, not the position of the product it protects. It does not touch the pest infestation eating into cane yields, the ₱7.28 billion the industry lost to its own import order, or the production costs that made substitution attractive in the first place. Food and beverage manufacturers now carry the difference the SRA artificial sweetener import fee created, and cane sugar still has to compete on the same terms it always did.

Stay ahead of the cost structures, capital flows, and market recalibrations that shape Philippine business in Business & Money section of Hemos PH.