Sweet Corn

We’re talking corn on the cob, frozen corn and canned corn. Sweet corn is bred to have plump, juicy kernels that include a high level of natural sugar when compared to field corn.  It’s that sugar that gives sweet corn the flavor we all love.

While field corn is harvested when mature and dry (so it can be transported and stored), sweet corn is harvested when the kernels are young and moist.

Field corn

The classic big ears of yellow dented corn you see dried and harvested in the fall. In fact, it’s sometime called “dent corn” because of the distinctive dent that forms on the kernel as the corn dries.

Field corn has dozens of uses, but it is most commonly fed to animals or used to make renewable fuels like ethanol to power our cars and trucks.  But only part of the kernel is used for ethanol (the starch), the rest of the kernel, including the protein and fat, are then used to make another popular animal feed known as distillers grains.

People don’t eat field corn directly from the field because it’s hard and certainly not sweet. Instead, field corn must go through a mill and be converted to food products and ingredients like corn syrup, corn flakes, yellow corn chips, corn starch or corn flour.



Sweet corn and field corn are closely related, but they aren’t exactly the same. They have very different tastes, and are used for different things. You wouldn’t want to grab an ear of field corn and plan to have some tasty corn on the cob!

Here’s a field that is planted with field corn on the right, and sweet corn on the left. (There’s more field corn in the back left.) Can you see the difference in the plants? The field corn is much taller and has fuller leaves than the sweet corn. The sweet corn looks sort of short and spindly. (Yes, it’s dry this year, which makes it a little more short and spindly than normal. But this is pretty close to how the plants will look in a normal year, too.)