How The Beet Makes Sugar

Sugars and starches form the basic building blocks of life. With the appearance of the first leaves, all green-leaved plants begin to manufacture their own food by converting the sun’s energy into chemical energy. Plants do this by combining air molecules and water molecules with the energy they receive from the sun to produce simple sugars. This process, called photosynthesis, enables the plants to make these simple sugars.

Some green-leaved plants produce more than simple sugars. The sugarbeet, one of these plants, goes all out to produce more sugar than the plant requires. Sugarbeets produce sugar in their leaves and then transfer this sugar to the roots.

To accomplish this, sugarbeets suck up water, a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, from the soil through the root system. This moisture moves through the plant to the leaves.

Meanwhile, carbon dioxide from the air enters the plant through the leaves. The sugarbeet now has carbon, taken from the carbon dioxide in the air, and hydrogen and oxygen, obtained from the water. Sunlight provides the energy catalyst that sets the chemical sugar producing process in motion.

The green pigment in leaves, called chlorophyll, transforms the sun’s energy to a usable form. In the presence of sunlight, sugarbeets produce a compound formed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, otherwise known as sugar.

Many plants make a simple six-carbon sugar called glucose. However, glucose is just the starting point for sugarbeets. Scientists call glucose a monosaccharide. When two of these molecules join together, they form a disaccharide, called sucrose, or common table sugar. Sugarbeets naturally manufacture this disaccharide table sugar. Both sugarbeets and sugar cane produce pure sucrose. Sugarbeets manufacture this crystallized air and sunshine in their leaves and then transfer the pure sugar to the root system for storage.

The rate at which the photosynthetic process takes place and the resulting amount of sugar produced by the beets depends on various factors. Temperatures play a big role; the amount of water at critical times plays a part, as does the amount of available sunshine throughout the growing season.

Because the beet produces sucrose, all sugar extraction plants extract pure table sugar from the beet root. This extraction process requires a series of boiling, evaporation and filtration processes to remove the sugar from the root. The resulting sugar is naturally pure white.