If you’ve ever wondered, “What’s in white sugar?” or thought about where sugar comes from, this post is for you. I had a chance to visit a sugar cane farm in Louisiana and here’s what I learned!

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As a registered dietitian, I get a ton of questions about sugar. Whether it’s curious clients, media interviews, or friends and family who want the inside scoop, I’m often sharing information to help other people feel informed about their food choices. And when it comes to the sweet stuff, it’s no different! You might think it’s odd that a dietitian would want to attend a sugar farm tour but when I had the opportunity to do it, I jumped at the chance.

This sugar farm tour was one of my first since the Covid-19 pandemic shut down travel. Leading up to 2020, attending farm tours was a regular thing for Street Smart Nutrition. I personally get curious about where my food comes from, but it’s also incredibly helpful to have first-hand insight to offer someone who wants to learn more.

Disclosure: I was invited to attend this tour by The Sugar Association, who covered my travel and expenses. They also provided the images you see in this blog post since their camera quality was considerably better than my phone!

As a dietitian who advocates for intuitive eating and evidence-based practice, there’s no reason to avoid or demonize sugar. I enjoy using it in things like coffee and tea, and many of my stir-fry recipes and other dishes use sugar to balance spicy, savory flavors. Plus, it’s found in some of my all-time favorite foods like ice cream!

This post will take you on a virtual sugar farm tour and show you how sugar is grown, processed, and refined. Let’s go!

Where Does Sugar Come From?

If you’re buying sugar in the United States, it’s going to come from one of three places:

1. Sugar beet farms, located in colder regions like the Red River Valley bordering North Dakota and Minnesota
2. Sugar cane farms found mostly along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana along with smaller growing regions in Florida and Texas
3. Imported from one of about 40 countries that supply raw sugar to the United States for refining

While I wish I could have also seen a sugar beet farm, that will have to wait for another day. Sugar cane is a tropical plant, sort of like an oversized tropical grass, so the only places it can grow well are warm climates with well-draining soils.

Sugar cane was first introduced to the area now known as Louisiana by Jesuit priests in the late 1700s, who learned how to crystallize sugar and extend its shelf life. This turned sugar into a commodity for trading, and if you fast forward to today, it’s still in high demand. Sugar is the highest valued crop in Louisiana, leading the state in revenue with an estimated $3 billion economic impact each year.

Fun Fact: If you’re a college football fan, you’ve probably watched the Sugar Bowl. But if you’ve never paused to consider the origin of the name, you can trace its roots back to the significance of sugar cane in Louisiana!

Louisiana is the northernmost region in the world where sugar cane can successfully grow. It needs good drainage so the sandy soils near the rivers, bayous, and tributaries that feed into them are more ideal than the denser, clay-like soils in other areas of the state. So let’s begin the sugar farm tour to get a closer look at where sugar comes from!

Sugar Cane Farm: Southern Louisiana

The sugar cane farm I visited is located west of New Orleans and south of Baton Rouge. Driving in, we started seeing bright, also neon green fields of tall sugar cane, which was our first clue we were nearing the farm.

Sugar cane is a type of tropical grass, able to withstand hurricane-force wind and rain. It’s also a perennial plant, meaning it will grow back each season after harvesting (similar to how some plants used in gardens and landscaping don’t need replanting every spring). Moden sugar cane harvesting follows a three-year cycle, where the first growing season is used to establish the plants, followed by two years of growth and harvesting.

Growing Sugar Cane in Louisiana

Modern sugar cane farming follows a three-year cycle. The first year, when the cane is planted, doesn’t yield a harvest. But once it’s established, it grows back the second and third year. It’s harvested starting around the end of November and continuing through the end of December. That’s the main reason why our sugar farm tour took place in early December – otherwise there wouldn’t be a lot of action to see!

In other regions, sugar cane farmers might keep harvesting the same plants for additional years, but after Year 3 yields start to drop. At that point, the fields can lay fallow for a year or rotate with soybeans before being re-plowed. That creates the drainage between each row that the sugar cane needs.

Although sugar cane starts out small (pictured above), it can grow 10 to 20 feet high. For context, I’m nearly six feet tall and standing between the rows made me feel like I was much shorter!

Fast Facts About Sugar

Here are some fast facts about sugar cane and where sugar comes from:

• Sugar cane is about 14% sucrose, nearly all of which is found in the cane part of the plant (not the leafy foliage or roots)
  • Sucrose is produced by plants through photosynthesis, not just sugar beets and sugar cane! You’ll also find it in fruits, vegetables, and nuts in varying amounts
• Sugar cane farmers use their own seed cane to plant every year, so some of their acreage is dedicated to supplying that vs. going to the mill or refinery
• There’s about 1 million acres in sugar cane production on any given year and the average farm size is about 1200 acres
• Sugar cane is a perishable crop, so it must be milled right away and can’t be stored to process later
• Burning is a common practice to remove the leaves (which are heavy and contain a lot of moisture) but sustainability efforts are looking at alternatives

Tasting Raw Sugar Cane

You can buy sugar cane in its raw form in markets around the world. It’s popular snack because of the refreshing, sweet flavor. The key is not to swallow the entire chunk though! It’s very fibrous and tough, so it’s better to chop it into bite size pieces, bite down to squeeze out the juice, then spit out whatever is left.

One of my favorite YouTube foodies, Jen from Just Eat Life, show you how in this video with some bonus ASMR content!

We “harvested” a single cane for taste sampling purposes, it takes a lot more than that to harvest an entire field. We were lucky to time it up with our visit and be able to see harvest in action. The equipment used to harvest and transport sugar cane is absolutely massive. I mean, just look at the size of this thing!

Fun Fact: The going rate for a sugar cane harvester (according to the farmers we spoke with) is about $400,000.

The sugar cane is chopped after being cut and emptied into a truck (pictured below), which brings it to the mill. The farm we visited happens to surround the mill so these trucks only need to drive a few minutes to get there. We spent a little more time watching sugar cane harvest continue before making the short trek to the sugar cane mill to see the next step for where sugar comes from!

Sugar Cane Mill: 98% Pure

Next stop: the sugar mill tour!

Upon arrival at the mill, the trucks pull up to a docking station and a sample core is pulled. The sample is only about 10-15 pounds and a fully loaded truck might weight upwards of 30 tons. The mill uses a formula to calculate the “theoretical recovered sugar”. The formula factors in the juice, sediment, and fiber of the sugar cane in that particular load.

This determines how much the farmer is paid, but margins are tight. The mill keeps a share to cover operating costs, based on an agreement with the growers. The landowner might also keep a share and most sugar cane acreage is rented (not owned).

The milling process is a hot and steamy one, and the inside of the mill was so loud it was sometimes hard to hear our tour guide! But we were able to see all the steps of sugar cane milling in action:

1. Transfer into the mill from the trucks, via long conveyor belts
2. Crushing, soaking, and squeezing the sugar cane to extract the juice. This also separates it from the rest of the plant material
3. Boiling the juice until it becomes a thick liquid and starts to crystallize
4. Spinning in giant centrifuges to remove all the liquid and yield raw sugar

Fun Fact: For all you food science nerds (I see you) and you might be wondering just how sweet the raw sugar is. This process takes it from about 14 brix to 60 brix after evaporating off all the liquid. 

Sustainability Considerations

It was also fascinating to see how little is wasted in this process. Bakers, distillers, and pharmaceutical companies use the molasses. It can also go into animal feed. After extracting the juice, the sugar cane stalk (now called “bagasse”) can be burned as fuel to run the mill. This produces a lot of electricity, some of which might even go towards supplying power to nearby towns. Sediment goes back to the fields. And finally, the water removed along the way contains some sugar so it’s pumped back to the start of the cycle to be reused.

When running at full capacity, this mill can produce up to 1 million pounds of sugar every day. It takes about 1 ton of sugar cane to yield 230 pounds of sugar. Just try to imagine the volume needed to supply this mill during peak harvest season!

After centrifuging, the raw sugar is 98-99% pure and is a light amber color (think turbinado sugar or sugar-in-the-raw). The remaining color comes from molasses and trace impurities. Although you technically could eat it at this point, it’s not a food-grade product. The mill can get raw sugar to 99% purity. Then the sugar refinery takes it the rest of the way. The sugar is stored in large warehouses until it’s time to load it up.

Last stop: the sugar refinery, to see how it gets to the form you’ll find in your store!

Sugar Cane Refinery: Domino Sugar

On the second day of our sugar farm tour we visited Domino Sugar’s Chalmette Refinery. It is the largest sugar refinery in the Western Hemisphere. That’s because it not only processes the sugar from Louisiana, but also sugar grown in nearby Texas and Florida. Plus, it handles some of the imported sugar that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. It’s over 100 years old and you can learn more about its history HERE.

The capacity of this place was pretty impressive. Domino Sugar can make anything from a 200,000 lb. railcar to an individual packet of sugar for your coffee. And everything in between. That includes granulated white sugar in various packaging, light and dark brown sugar, powdered sugar, and a few specialty products. Regardless of what the end product is, it all starts in the same enormous warehouse (shown below). It can house up to 80 million pounds!

Sugar Refining Process

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to take photos or film inside the refinery. This is actually is more common than not for all the farm and field tours I’ve attended. But we did get to visit multiple sites across the refinery campus to see what happens to the raw sugar:

1. Raw sugar moves from the storage site to large tanks to be melted down. It needs to be in a liquid form to filter out the remaining impurities
2. “Baby” sugar, or extremely fine crystals, are added to initiate the re-crystallization process. Picture your science kit from grade school for growing rock candy, only much more precise!
3. Repeating the centrifuging and evaporation process to remove all remaining color and get it dry enough to package
4. Packaging lines for the intended product (bags, boxes, individual packets, etc)

Contrary to popular myth, white sugar isn’t bleached. There’s nothing added to the raw sugar except the small crystals needed to help it re-crystallize. It was amazing to see the drums of the high speed centrifuges literally change from brown to white before our eyes. I wish I could have taken a video to share with you! It happens in a matter of seconds and goes to show just how efficient this technology has gotten.

Final Steps and How To Use

Once packaged, the sugar is ready to head to its next destination for food manufacturing or grocery stores. Sugar plays an important role in the processing of other foods. But at the household level most of us are using it for baking or cooking. And of course, for sweetening beverages like coffee or tea.

Here are some other non-food uses for sugar:

• Making a DIY sugar body scrub, which is great for exfoliation
• Keeping cut flowers fresher, longer (just add 3 teaspoons of sugar and 2 tablespoons of vinegar to your warm water and add your cut flower stems)
• Combatting garden pests like nematodes, naturally, while feeding microorganisms in your soil (just sprinkle the base of your plants and the soil around them with a handful of sugar)

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That brings us to the end of this virtual sugar farm tour to learn where sugar comes from! Thanks so much for reading, I sincerely hope it was as informative for you as it was for me. Sugar is something I use and enjoy without hesitation, but it wasn’t always that way. Having this unique opportunity to step into the processing of making sugar really demystified it in a lot of ways. And as a non-diet dietitian, I’ll continue advocating for facts over fear, especially for ingredients as misrepresented as sugar.

And if you like checking out these glimpses into where food comes from, check out a few of my other posts to learn more!

• Where Do Dates Come From? Harvest Tour with Natural Delights
• Where Does Food Come From? A Closer Look at Kansas Agriculture
• What I Learned On A Pig Farm
• Where Does Oatmeal Come From? (Hint: it’s not too far from where I am in the Midwest!)