US Sugar Corporation

US Sugar Corporation

The U.S. Sugar Corporation (USSC) is a privately held company, founded in 1931, based in Clewiston, Florida. The company farms over 187,858 acres (760.23 km2) of land in the counties of Hendry, Glades and Palm Beach. USSC currently has approximately 1,700 employees. It is the largest producer of sugarcane and refined cane sugar in the United States, with annual capacity of 700,000 tons of raw sugar, accounting for about 8.3 percent of domestic production of beet and cane sugar. The company's Southern Gardens division has extensive citrus operations, including over 30,000 acres of citrus groves, a citrus tree nursery, and a citrus processing plant with an annual capacity of 120 million gallons of juice, making it the largest U.S. supplier of bulk not-from-concentrate orange juice for private label packaging. The company also operates an internal railroad network to transport harvested sugarcane, and an independent, short line railroad, the South Central Florida Express, which provides commercial haulage of bulk commodities over 159 miles of track. Production of raw sugar by USSC over the past four years ranged from 598,000 to 706,000 tons, averaging 652,600 tons (Figure 2). During this same period, the volume of sugarcane processed averaged 5.96 million tons, while production of molasses, a byproduct of sugar milling, averaged 36.7 million gallons.