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Any plant containing sucrose can become a producer of sugar, but the only raw material used officially for the world production are sugar cane and sugar beets.
This article will briefly describe the stages of production of sugar beet.

Beet are uprooted and transported to the factory. When the cargo arrives, it undergoes to washing and then is switched to the process of extraction of sauce. With a machine that cuts roots, beets are cut in strips, called tapes. The tapes go by solid/liquid extractors to allow the extraction of sucrose by hydrolysis.

The resulting sauce has a blue-black color and is full of impurities: minerals, organic acids, bases containing nitrogen, phosphorus compounds and vegetal colloids.

Then it goes to treatment, after which the sauce will take on a yellow color more or less intense. The treatment is obtained by adding milk of lime and carbonate, and then proceeds to the filtration. Subsequently, sulfur dioxide is added, which further bleach the sauce.
The sauce is processed into syrup, concentrating to contain up to 60% sucrose. This phase is done using steam produced by a boiler.

The syrup can be crystallized immediately or stored for processing at a later point, in this case, the concentration of sucrose should be higher (about 70%).

The crystallization occurs in equipment called bubbles cooking, which are large reactors with heating system. When comes the syrup, it's further concentrated to saturation and then ground sugar is added, to provide the seeds of crystallization. To feed the crystals is added other syrup, maintaining heating.
From bubble cooking results a mixture called cooked mass. The cooked mass is sent to a centrifuge which separates a top-quality sugar and a green drain; the drain is concentrated, crystallized and centrifuged again to obtain a second-quality sugar and molasses. The molasses is an aqueous solution of sucrose that can not be crystallized.

The sugar produced by crystallization is yellow (more or less) but the food industry and consumers require a white sugar, so a process of refining is needed. First the sugar is dissolved in water, then active carbon is added to bleach the sugar completely.