Most of the sugar in your kitchen comes from one of two crops: sugarcane or sugar beets. Sugarcane accounts for roughly 80% of the world’s sugar supply, with sugar beets making up the remaining 20%. Despite coming from completely different plants, the end product is chemically identical. Both produce sucrose, a molecule made of one glucose unit bonded to one fructose unit.
How Plants Make Sugar
Every green plant produces sugar through photosynthesis, but sugarcane and sugar beets are exceptionally good at storing it. During photosynthesis, a plant captures carbon dioxide from the air and uses sunlight to rearrange those carbon atoms into small energy-rich molecules. These molecules travel from the plant’s chloroplasts into the surrounding cell fluid, where they’re assembled into sucrose. Sucrose is the primary sugar that plants move through their vascular systems to fuel growth and store energy.
Sugarcane stores that sucrose in its thick, fibrous stalks. Sugar beets pack it into their large white roots. The challenge of sugar production is extracting the sucrose from these plant tissues and removing everything else.
Where Sugar Is Grown
Sugarcane is a tropical grass that thrives in warm, humid climates. Brazil dominates global production, supplying about 24% of the world’s sugar (around 43.7 million metric tons in 2024/2025). India follows at 15%, with Thailand and China each contributing about 6%. Sugar beets, by contrast, grow in cooler temperate climates. The European Union is the world’s largest beet sugar producer, responsible for about 9% of global sugar output. The United States grows both crops: sugarcane in Louisiana, Florida, Hawaii, and Texas, and sugar beets across northern states like Minnesota, North Dakota, and Michigan.
From Sugarcane to Sugar
Sugarcane processing starts with breaking the cane’s tough outer structure using revolving knives, shredders, or crushers, then grinding the stalks to squeeze out the juice. This raw juice is cloudy and full of impurities, so it gets treated with heat and lime to clarify it. The lime causes impurities to clump together and settle out.
Once clarified, the juice moves through evaporators that boil off water in stages, concentrating it into a thick syrup. This syrup enters vacuum pans, where further evaporation pushes the sugar concentration past the point of supersaturation. Technicians then “seed” the solution with tiny sugar crystals, giving the dissolved sucrose a surface to latch onto. The crystals grow until they’re spun in a centrifuge, which separates the solid sugar from the remaining liquid. That leftover liquid is molasses, a dark, viscous byproduct that still contains 60 to 63% sucrose along with trace minerals.
What comes out of this first round is raw sugar, a tan-colored crystal still coated in a thin film of molasses. To make the white granulated sugar most people buy, refineries wash these crystals, dissolve them again, then run the liquid through activated carbon or bone char to strip out color and remaining impurities. The purified liquid is re-evaporated, re-crystallized, and centrifuged one more time. The result is white sugar with a purity of at least 99.7% sucrose, per international food standards set by the Codex Alimentarius Commission.
From Sugar Beets to Sugar
Sugar beet processing takes a different approach because you can’t squeeze juice from a root the way you crush a stalk. Instead, beets are sliced into thin strips called cossettes, which are soaked in hot water in a process called diffusion. The hot water draws the sucrose out of the beet cells and into solution, producing a sugar-rich liquid called diffusion juice.
From there, the process converges with cane refining. The juice is treated with lime and carbon dioxide to remove impurities, filtered, evaporated, and crystallized in vacuum pans. Because beet sugar goes through full purification in a single facility, there’s no separate “raw” and “refined” stage. The white sugar that comes out of a beet processing plant is chemically indistinguishable from refined cane sugar.
Corn Syrup: Sugar From Starch
Not all sugar starts as sucrose. High fructose corn syrup, widely used in soft drinks and processed foods in the United States, comes from corn starch. The starch itself isn’t sweet. Manufacturers first use enzymes to break the long starch chains down into individual glucose molecules. Then a second enzyme, glucose isomerase, rearranges some of that glucose into fructose, which is significantly sweeter. The result is a liquid sweetener that’s a mix of glucose and fructose, similar in sweetness to table sugar but produced entirely from corn.
Other Natural Sources of Sugar
Maple Syrup
Maple sugar comes from the sap of sugar maple trees, which flows most freely during late winter when daytime temperatures rise above freezing but nights are still cold. The sap itself is only about 2% sugar. Turning it into syrup requires boiling off enormous amounts of water: roughly 43 gallons of sap to produce a single gallon of finished syrup. That boiling concentrates the sugar to 66% and triggers chemical reactions that create maple syrup’s distinctive amber color and flavor.
Coconut Sugar
Coconut sugar comes from the sap of coconut palm flower buds. Farmers tap into the buds and collect the sap in small batches, a process that doesn’t harm the tree. The sap is heated in large pans until the water evaporates and it thickens into a rich syrup. Once cooled and hardened, it’s either granulated or formed into blocks. The resulting sugar retains a caramel-like flavor from the compounds naturally present in the sap.
Why It All Ends Up as the Same Molecule
Regardless of whether sugar comes from a tropical grass, a root vegetable, or a palm tree, the sucrose molecule is always the same: 12 carbon atoms, 22 hydrogen atoms, and 11 oxygen atoms bonded together, with a molecular weight of 342.3. Your body breaks it down the same way no matter the source, splitting it into glucose and fructose during digestion. The differences between sugar sources come down to trace minerals, flavor compounds, and how much processing the final product undergoes, not the sucrose itself.