Sugar refinery

A sugar refinery is a refinery which processes raw sugar into white refined sugar or that processes sugar beet to refined sugar.

Many cane sugar mills produce raw sugar, which is sugar that still contains molasses, giving it more colour (and any associated nutrients) than the white sugar which is normally consumed in households and used as an ingredient in soft drinks and foods. While cane sugar does not strictly need refining, sugar from beet is almost always refined to remove the strong, almost always unwanted, taste of beets from it. The refined sugar produced is more than 99 percent pure sucrose.

Whereas many sugar mills only operate during a limited time of the year during the cane harvesting period, many cane sugar sugar refineries work the whole year round. Sugar beet refineries tend to have shorter periods when they process beet but may store intermediate product and process that in the off-season.

Raw sugar is either processed into white refined sugar in local refineries, and sold to the local industry and consumers, or it is exported and refined in the country of destination. 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. The world´s largest sugar refinery company is American Sugar Refining with facilities in North America and Europe.