Sugar and Other Sweeteners
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INTRODUCTION
Sugar and starch are among the most products available, and huge mdustnes exist worldwide to extract and process them from agricultural sources. The world production of sugar (sucrose from cane and beet) in 1999/2000 was 136 million metric tons, raw value, with 27.4 percent of that being beet sugar and 72.6 percent being cane sugar. 1 The proportion of beet sugar to cane sugar has fallen steadily since about 1971 when it .constituted 42.8 percent of total suga; productiOn. The total production of sugar has also risen dramatically since then, when it was 71.7 million tons in 1971/72.1 The primary use of sugar is as a sweetener in the manufacture of food and in household use. When used for such purposes, most of it is highly refined or purified, but considerable quantities are consumed in some areas of the world as a crude product, as in India where as much as 29 percent production is consumed ~bunda~t pla~t
*~ugar Processing Research Institute (Managing Director), New Orleans, LA.
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Riegel Handbook of Industrial Chemistry, lOth Edition Edtted by Kent. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York 2003
as uncentrifuged sugar (gur, also known as jagger~, and khandsari) or as cane juice.2 Sug~r IS used to a limited extent in the productiOn of other chemicals, such as sucrose esters, and in the form of by-product molasses as a substrate for fermentation processes and to produce alcohol, both for consumption and power, usually mixed with gasoline. . Stare~ is widely used in the textile and paper mdustnes, as well as for food. A major use of starch is its hydrolytic conversion to glucose and enzymatic conversion to fructose for use as a sweetener in the food industry. Technological developments and governmental price-support programs for the domestic (United States) cane and beet sugar industries begun in the mid1970s greatly magnified the importance of starch as a source of nutritive sweeteners. 3 Starch-derived sweeteners compete directly and successfully with sugar in the United States, and increasingly in other countries. The sugar industry has been characterized by steady, small incremental improvements in te~hnology and production over the years, with subsequent improvements across the process, from field practices to new products. 4
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RIEGEL'S HANDBOOK OF INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY
SUGAR History
The ancestry of the sugar cane and its use as a food have been traced to the island of New Guinea. (An interesting legend related by J. A. C. HugilP associates sugar cane with the origin of the human race.) Around 8000 B.C., the plant started on its migration from New Guinea to the many areas of southeastern Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malay, Indochina, and eastern India, with humans probably acting as its main dispersal agent. 6 It was in Bengalese India that sugarcane first was cultivated as a field crop and the juice manufactured into various solid forms. A general knowledge of sugar was prevalent throughout India by 400 B.c. By the A.D. tenth century, sugar cultivation and manufacturing had b
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