Among the world’s foremost sugar producers (presented in Table 3.4), the United States, France, Germany, and Russia produce their sugar mostly from sugar beet. In the case of the United States, 53% of its sugar production comes from sugar beet and the balance comes from sugarcane. China produces 7% of its sugar from sugar beet (700,000 ton on average). The remaining percentage corresponds to the cane mostly cropped in southeastern provinces of the country (10,000,000 ton on average; FAS, 2005).

Sugar beet contains from 12 to 15% sucrose. The beets arrive at the produc­tion plant without crown and are loaded in silos by mechanical means through

channels with circulating water. The beets are washed and passed through sys­tems retaining diverse solid materials, such as stones, leaves, and small roots. Once washed, the beets are transported to the choppers where they are shredded into very thin slices (3 mm), called cossettes, and passed to a machine called a diffuser to extract the sugar content into a water solution. The diffusers are large rotary drums where the cossettes are put in contact with a hot water stream flow­ing in the opposite direction. The sucrose is extracted from the vacuoles of the beet cells into the flowing water generating the raw juice or diffusion juice. The spent cossettes are called pulp and leave the diffuser with about a 95% moisture content, but with low sucrose content. To recover part of the sucrose contained in the pulp, it is pressed in screw presses reducing the moisture to 75%. After dry­ing in rotary drums, the pressed pulp is sold as animal feed due to its high fiber content, while the resulting liquid is added to the diffusers. The diffusion juice is

an impure sucrose solution also containing gums, pectin, amino acids, mineral salts, nitrogenous compounds, etc. This juice has about 16° Brix and 85% purity. It can be clarified by a process very similar to that of cane sugar. Thus, a clear juice with 15° Brix is obtained. From this point, the process is practically the same as for cane sugar.