Swiss Sugar Factory (page 2 of 2)

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My visit of the largest sugar factory in Switzerland. Walk in as a beet and exit as a thousand sugar cubes - a life-changing experience.

Let's follow this guy into the factory itself.

A conveyor belt grabs the beets in the giant silo ...

... and pours them into a giant shredder.

... where they are transformed into thin strips called cossettes in the trade.

Time to kiss the beets bye-bye. The factory is spotlessly clean and everything flows into pipes from now. But right before we enter the factory's main buildings, let's have a look at the most intriguing ingredient used to manufacture sugar.

Tons of stones are used to make sugar. No shit. A huge parking lot receives limestone straight from the quarry. A bulldozer brings it to a large conveyor belt.

The belt moves the stones to a huge elevator that rises on a tall tower. I climbed the tower to see the stones be dumped automatically into a gigantic furnace where they are burnt with coke to produce lime. I was quite surprised to see this total vertical integration, from the stone to the sugar cube. The lime will be mixed with water to purify the beetroot juice. The resulting product is sugar, the same thing as the one from sugarcane.

Hervé This, the french food scientist, once told me When I hear people say they don't want to eat agar-agar or some other food additives becasue "it is not natural", I ask them: Have you ever seen how they make sugar? They mix beetroot with lime, how natural does that sound? Everything is natural at the end of the day.

Let me explain what will happen. The beetroots strips are soaked in hot water where the sugar will dissolve (Rohsaft). Limestone and Coke are baked and mixed with water to obtain lime water (Kalkmilch). This is mixed with the beet water (1. Karbonatation) and CO2 from the lime oven is bubbled through. Most impuritied dissolved in the beetroot juice will then precipitate as the limestone falls down (Ricokalk). The clear juice now contains mostly sugar and water (Dünnsaft). Its water is boiled off until a concentrated juice is obtained (Dicksaft). This will be placed in a rotating juice extractor that will separate the white sugar (Weisszucker) from the uncrystallisable treacle (Melasse).

Note: I apologize for the pictures quality but the factory was way bigger than I thought and my morning was spent running around an Heathrow-sized factory with a huge bags of equipment on my back. I did not get a chance to open my bag of light and conversely the photos suffered.

Beet juice undergoes carbonatation in these tanks. By mixing with calcium hydroxide (milk of lime), the majority of impurities precipitate and fall down at the bottom of the tank. Carbon dioxide is bubbled through and the lime returns to stone as chalk (calcium carbonate).

A glimpse into the system - the sugar syrup being boiled to concentrate it.

This giant cauldron moves constantly to store the crystallized sugar and molasses before it can be sent to the next stage - centrifuge juice extractor.

Hot water coming from the crystallization machines is cooled down in this tower before being sent back to square one to clean new beetroots.

These giant rotating centrifugal juice extractors separate the heavier molasses from the sugar.

A floor below, we see showers of sugar falling from below the drums of the juice extractors.

Most of the sugar will be stored in dry silos, to be conditioned in consumer-sized bags in an underground printing and packing unit.

The same sugar bags I use in my kitchen come out by the dozen with the trilingual labelling we use in Switzerland.

Sugar cubes move out under the watchful eye of an operative ...

... and are wrapped two-by-two for sale to coffeshops.

And what did I get for all my efforts? My weight in sugar.

I thank Mr Rudolf Fankhauser for his kind and instructive visit of his factory