A Napoleonic blockade turned a humble Prussian beet into a sugar giant
In 1747 a Berlin chemist showed that beets hold the same sugar as cane, just not much of it. Breeders pushed the content from about 5 percent to around 18 percent, and when Britain's blockade cut Europe off from cane sugar during the Napoleonic wars, beet factories spread fast. By 1880 beets supplied over half the world's sugar.
The sugar beet is a cultivar group of the common beet, a sibling of beetroot and chard whose closest wild relative is the sea beet. Its white, conical root, weighing half a kilo to a kilo, is about 75 percent water and 20 percent sugar made in the leaves and stored below ground. It thrives only in temperate climates too cold for cane. Back in 1575 the French writer Olivier de Serres noticed that boiled beetroot gave a vermilion syrup, but cane sugar tasted better and the idea went nowhere.
Frederick the Great of Prussia subsidised the experiments that mattered. Andreas Sigismund Marggraf of the Berlin Academy isolated beet sugar at 1.3 to 1.6 percent concentration and identified the white beet as the best source. His student Franz Karl Achard began breeding in 1786, tested 23 varieties and chose a strain from Halberstadt. Refined into the white Silesian sugar beet, it became the ancestor of every modern sugar beet. Achard opened the first beet sugar factory in 1801 at Kunern, in Silesia, now Konary in Poland.
France took up the idea, and the blockade made it essential. About 5 percent of the world's sugar came from beets in 1840, rising past half by 1880. Commercial production in North America began at Alvarado, California, in 1879, and German settlers took the crop to Chile around 1850. Harvest and processing is called the campaign; factories run around the clock, and in Britain it lasts about five months.
Growing beets was once gruelling, with fields hoed and thinned by hand and workers chopping crowns off with a beet hook. Machines now lift, top and clean six rows at a time. The best sugar comes where warm days meet cool nights, as in Idaho and Colorado. In 2024 the world harvested 294 million tonnes, led by Russia and Germany.
Source: Sugar beet
