Where does Sugar beet come from?
The sugar beet comes from Prussia, from Berlin and Silesia. There, in the 18th century, a chemist found sugar in beets and his student began breeding a beet rich enough to be worth refining. Today beet sugar makes up about a fifth of the world's sugar.
Sugar in a Berlin laboratory
Beets had long been grown as vegetables and as animal feed. In 1747 Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, a chemist at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, isolated sugar from beets and showed that it was identical to the sugar made from cane. His beets held only 1.3 to 1.6% sugar, and the best of them was the white beet. Marggraf recognised the economic potential of his discovery, but he did not pursue it, and it did not lead to commercial production.
Achard's beet and factory
His student Franz Karl Achard took up the work. From the 1780s, first on his estate at Kaulsdorf near Berlin, he tested 23 varieties of beet and chose a strain from Halberstadt. From it Moritz von Koppy and his son selected white, conical roots: the White Silesian sugar beet, ancestor of all modern sugar beets. In 1801, backed by King Frederick William III, Achard set up the world's first beet sugar factory at Kunern in Silesia, now Konary in Poland, and in 1802 it began processing beets.
Why people think of France
France made beet sugar a big industry. During the Napoleonic Wars a British blockade cut the French Empire off from cane sugar from the West Indies, and in 1811 Napoleon took up the new process; under his influence 40 beet sugar factories were set up in France. The industry collapsed for a time after his fall but recovered in the 1840s, and by 1880 beet sugar had overtaken cane sugar in tonnage. But the beet and the first factory were Prussian.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Sugar beet ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Franz Karl Achard ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Andreas Sigismund Marggraf ↗ · britannica.com ↗ · de.wikipedia.org ↗
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