Sugar 101: Meet Your Made-In-America Sweetener

It’s a new year and there’s a new Congress in town! It’s time for a refresher on how sugar is made in America. This is the first in our new series of Sugar Beat newsletters covering the basics of sweet – so stay tuned for more Sugar 101.

What is sugar?

Real sugar is made by plants. More specifically, it’s made by sugarbeets and sugarcane. Both crops produce sucrose, or sugar – the same sugar that you use to sweeten your morning coffee or in Grandma’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. Sucrose is actually found in all green plants, including almonds, but it’s most abundant in sugarbeets and sugarcane, making them the most efficient crops for farmers to grow and extract sugar from.

Sugar serves as an essential ingredient in thousands of food products, adding flavor, acting as a preservative, balancing acidity, and more.

In America, family farmers and workers supply about 75% of our sugar.

What is a sugarbeet?

Sugarbeets are root vegetables that grow below the ground, similar to a potato or a red beet – but they’re white! Sugarbeets are mainly grown in the upper Midwest and northern Plains, but are also grown in southern California. Minnesota produces the most sugarbeets of any state in the country.

When fully grown, a sugarbeet is about a foot long, weighs two-to-five pounds, and is about 18% sucrose or sugar.

What is sugarcane?

Sugarcane is a perennial grass, meaning it regrows after harvest, with sucrose or sugar content as high as 20%. Sugarcane can grow taller than a basketball hoop!

In the U.S., sugarcane is grown in Florida and Louisiana. Sugarcane was also grown in Texas, but unfortunately, the last sugarcane mill in Texas was driven out of business in 2024 due to Mexico’s inconsistent compliance with a long-standing water treaty.

Sugarcane can be harvested for several consecutive years from one planting, and once harvested, one stalk of sugarcane can yield 30 teaspoons of sugar!

Where are sugarbeets and sugarcane grown?

The reach of America’s sugar production is coast-to-coast: Sugarcane thrives in warm climates while sugarbeets are mostly grown in areas with colder climates (although the highest-yielding sugarbeets are grown in Southern California!). Across the country, 11,000 sugarbeet and sugarcane farmers produce about 9 million tons of sugar a year on 2 million acres.

We operate a nationwide network of factories, mills, refineries, and storage facilities so sugar is always available when and where it’s needed. A strong domestic sugar industry is strategically important for American food production!

How real sugar gets from the plants to your table.

Sugar goes from plant to product in four simple steps: it is extracted from the plant, washed with water, crystalized and dried. There are slight differences in how we get sugar from sugarcane and sugarbeet that are outlined below.

Sugarcane is harvested from the field and then washed and fed into mills close to the farm. Huge rollers press out the cane juice. That juice is then clarified, concentrated and crystalized into raw sugar, which is next sent on to a sugar refinery. In those refineries, raw cane sugar gets cleaned of plant impurities by dissolving and filtering the sugar. Once the sugar’s naturally white color is revealed, the refined sugar is packaged and ready for consumption!

After harvesting, sugarbeets are washed and sliced into thin strips at a factory near the fields. The strips are then added to boiling water to extract a sugary juice, which is then filtered and boiled in a vacuum to produce a syrup containing sucrose crystals. Then, the crystals are separated from the syrup with centrifuges and dried in rotating drums. Finally, the crystals are packaged and the refined sugar is sent to customers across the country!

Every part of the sugarbeet and sugarcane is put to use. While extracting sugar is the primary goal, both processes result in many co-products which minimizes waste. Sugarbeet pulp can be used in animal and pet food while sugarcane fiber is often used to power factory operations.

American sugar factories and refineries are all cooperatively owned, employee-owned or family-owed.

Want to learn more about the process of making sugar? Check out this video or follow us on Instagram.