1A common assumption is that all white sugar is derived from sugar cane.
2But 30% of the world's white sugar supply comes from the sugar beet.
3While sugarcane grows only in tropical climates,
4the heartier sugar beet can be cultivated in cooler regions and in poorer soil.
5It takes about seven beets to produce a little more than two pounds of sugar.
6The byproducts of processing, molasses and beet pulp, are used for animal feed.
7The processing of sugar beets yields various grades of sugar.
8The lower ones are reprocessed to become white sugar.
9Farmers plant beet seeds in the spring and harvest the mature crop in the fall.
10Mechanical harvesters attack six rows at a time.
11They rip the plant out of the ground, chop off the leaves and crown, leaving just the bulbous root.
12A beetroot typically weighs about two pounds.
1317 to 18% of that is sucrose, which is sugar.
14A loader transfers the harvested beets into trucks.
15The loader's sieve removes about a third of the soil along the way.
16When the trucks arrive at the sugar factory,
17they unload the beets, soil and stones included, onto a conveyor belt, which transports them to a washing station.
18First, they head into a revolving drum
19where, under a shower of water, the beets rub against each other, dislodging the soil.
20The water flow floats the beets, which then exit the drum.
21The stones stay behind, collected in separator buckets along the edge.
22A screw conveyor moves the beets to a transfer system,
23which brings them inside the factory to be processed into sugar.
24Inside, slicing machines cut the incoming beets into "cassettes"
25(strips about the shape of French fries, but smaller.)
26The cassettes travel on a conveyor belt into a large tank of hot water,
27where they soak for a few minutes.
28This gets their cell membranes to begin opening,
29clearing the way for the sucrose to exit during the next operation,
30in which the cassettes are pumped to the bottom of a 22-yard-high extraction tower.
31A rotating shaft within the tower transports them slowly upward against a downward flow of hot water.
32This draws out the sucrose, producing a sugary water called raw juice.
33The next step is to purify this raw juice.
34In a giant kiln, they burn limestone with coke to produce the chemical compound calcium hydroxide (also called lime milk).
35They add it in several stages to the raw juice.
36Meanwhile, they press the sucrose-stripped cassettes into pulp to sell as animal feed.
37They add carbon dioxide to the lime milk and juice mixture.
38This absorbs 1/3 of the juice's impurities,
39enabling a filtration system to remove them.
40The raw juice exits as a golden sugar solution called thin juice.
41The thin juice then enters a six-step evaporation process, which reduces it to a thick, syrup-like juice.
42From there, they pump it into a four-phase crystallization system.
43In phase one, they heat and add seed crystals
44(tiny, identical-sized sugar crystals made separately using a complex cooling and evaporating process).
45As the water in the juice evaporates,
46about half of the sucrose crystallizes, growing the seed crystals.
47Then, a centrifuge machine separates the crystals called refined sugar from the remaining syrup.
48The syrup goes through this crystallization centrifuge process three more times,
49producing a lesser grade of sugar each time.
50The factory dissolves and recrystallizes the lowest two grades.
51The highest grades of sugar go into dryers.
52On the way, passing through a screening machine, which separates any crystals which are too large.
53The factory dissolves these crystals, then puts the sugary liquid through the crystallization process again.
54So in the end, there are two grades of beet sugar, which go into silos where they're stored until it's time to package them for sale...
55...as refined sugar and white sugar.