Sugar refining

A sugar refinery is a refinery which processes raw sugar into white refined sugar or that processes sugar beet to refined sugar.

Many cane sugar mills produce raw sugar, which is sugar that still contains molasses, giving it more colour (and impurities) than the white sugar which is normally consumed in households and used as an ingredient in soft drinks and foods. While cane sugar does not need refining to be palatable, sugar from sugar beet is almost always refined to remove the strong, almost always unwanted, taste of beets from it. The refined sugar produced is more than 99 percent pure sucrose.

Whereas many sugar mills only operate during a limited time of the year during the cane harvesting period, many cane sugar refineries work the whole year round. Sugar beet refineries tend to have shorter periods when they process beet but may store intermediate product and process that in the off-season.

Raw sugar is either processed into white refined sugar in local refineries, and sold to the local industry and consumers, or it is exported and refined in the country of destination. Sugar refineries are often located in heavy sugar-consuming regions such as North America, Europe, and Japan. Since the 1990s many state-of-the art sugar refineries have been built in the Middle East and North Africa region, e.g. in Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Algeria. The world´s largest sugar refinery company is American Sugar Refining with facilities in North America and Europe.

The raw sugar is stored in large warehouses and then transported into the sugar refinery by means of transport belts. In the traditional refining process, the raw sugar is first mixed with heavy syrup and centrifuged to wash away the outer coating of the raw sugar crystals, which is less pure than the crystal interior. Many sugar refineries today buy high pol sugar and can do without the affination process.

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