Unlike sugar beet, cane sugar prefers warmer tropical climates with plentiful sunshine and rainfall and is therefore usually grown in areas such as Brazil, India, Cuba, Mauritius and the West Indies. Sugar cane is a tropical grass growing between four to five metres tall with deep roots into the ground. Not only is its size and shape different to beet, but its sucrose content is not stored in the root but in the long stalks, with the sugar then produced by photosynthesis occurring in the cane leaves.

When growing cane sugar, its seeds are too small to be directly planted into the soil, therefore mature harvested stalks are cut into segments called ratoons roughly 50 centimetres long and are placed in furrows and covered in soil. It takes 12 months from this point for the sugar cane to be harvested. The cane will only grow properly above 21°c and in the summer can grow by as much as 1 cm per day. Several harvests can be grown from each cane, before it needs re-planting. Beet seeds, however, are planted deep in the soil and only take around 70 to 90 days until they can be harvested.  While this is considerably shorter than the long gestation period of cane sugar, beet seed can only produce a single crop.

Once harvested both cane sugar and beet sugar need to go through a refining process before they arrive at the processing factory. This is not only to remove the sugar ready for processing but also to remove any impurities. To extract the sucrose, there are some steps that both plants go through, and some steps that are different depending on whether its beet or cane.

To extract the juice both are washed, with sugar beet then being sliced. In contrast, cane is cut and crushed. For both the juice is purified, filtered and then boiled. Once this has happened, it is then spun in a centrifuge (cane having multiple spins due to its dark brown colour) to remove impurities and to separate the sugar crystal from the adhering film of molasses. As mentioned in my previous blog on specialist sugars and their applications, the refining process of sugar can be adjusted in numerous ways to produce different types of sugar crystals.

Do beet sugar and cane sugar differ once processed?

Once sugar beet and cane sugar have been refined and arrive at the processing factory they are both chemically identical despite their origins. Both can be used to produce our range of sugar products, including liquid sugar, golden and invert syrups as well as custom formulations. Equally, beet sugar and cane sugar once manufactured undergo the same rigorous testing to ensure quality and consistency in each batch that leaves our factory.