Sugar Museum (Berlin)

The Sugar Museum in Berlin, devoted to the history and technology of sugar, is the oldest such museum in the world, having opened in 1904. It is now part of the German Museum of Technology. Until November 2012, it was housed in the Institut für Lebensmitteltechnologie (Institute of Food Technology) in Wedding, Mitte.

Exhibits were labelled in German only, although an English-language pamphlet describing them was also available.Lonely Planet called the Sugar Museum "quirky... a surprisingly entertaining exhibit where you’ll learn all about the origin of sugar and its chemistry."

Since November 2012, the Sugar Museum has been closed, but a modernised exhibit is scheduled to open at the German Museum of Technology in Kreuzberg in November 2015.

Berlin played an important role in the history of sugar production. Andreas Sigismund Marggraf discovered beet sugar there in 1747, and his student Franz Carl Achard was the first to produce it, beginning in 1783, in Kaulsdorf, which became part of Greater Berlin in 1920. In 1799 he presented the product to King Frederick William III of Prussia, who sponsored him in establishing in 1801 the first beet sugar production facility in the world in Cunern, in Silesia (now Konary, Wołów County, Poland).

In 1867 a sugar research laboratory was established in Berlin under Carl Scheibler. On 8 May 1904, the Institute for Sugar Industry which had developed out of this opened, and the Sugar Museum simultaneously opened on the upper floor of the building, as the first such institution in the world.Edmund Oskar von Lippmann is largely credited for the opening of the museum. In 1945, the museum became the property of Berlin, and in 1978 of the Technical University of Berlin. In 1988, it became a state museum of the former GDR and, after a year of renovations, reopened on 22 September 1989. Since 1 November 1995, it has been a branch museum of the German Museum of Technology. The museum remained in its original building in the sugar industry neighbourhood of Wedding until November 2012.

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