Sugar Refinery

A sugar refinery is a factory which refines raw sugar.

Many cane sugar mills produce raw sugar, which is sugar with more colour (and any associated nutrients) than the white sugar which is normally consumed in households and used as an ingredient in soft drinks, cookies and so forth. Raw sugar is either processed into white refined sugar in local refinieries and sold to the local industry and consumers or it is exported and further processed into white refined sugar in the country of destination.

While cane sugar does not strictly need refining, beet sugar is almost always refined to remove the strong, almost always unwanted, taste of beets from it thus also removing nutrients that are found in beets.

The sugar refineries are often located in heavy sugar-consuming regions such as North America, Europe, and Japan. Since the 1990s many state-of-the art sugar refineries have been built in the MENA region, e.g. in Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Algeria. In the second stage, white sugar is produced that is more than 99 percent pure sucrose. In such refineries, raw sugar is further purified. Whereas many sugar mills only operate during a limited time of the year during the cane harvesting period, many sugar refineries work the whole year round.

The world´s largest sugar refinery company is American Sugar Refining with facilities in North America and Europe.