8/26/2009:
Whether it's granular or powder, brown or white, sugar remains a staple in households across the country. For many North Dakotan's, that sugar is often bought from the grocery store in little five-pound blue and white bags with the words "Crystal Sugar" neatly printed across the face. While we often associate our sugar with sugarcane, a commodity grown in the tropics, the sugar we buy from "Crystal Sugar" is produced right here in Midwest using our own home-grown beets.
While knowledge of the nutritional and medicinal value of its predecessor dates back to ancient Egypt, the first modern sugarbeets weren't developed until the mid-eighteenth century. In 1747 Prussian chemist, Andreas Marggraf, found that sugar crystals retrieved from crushed beet roots were entirely identical in their properties to sugar crystals from sugarcane. Marggraf's student, Karl Achard, further expanded on his research and developed beets with a higher sugar content as well as the process by which to extract it. These discoveries may have gone unheralded but for the Napoleonic War and a British blockade of Western Europe. Denied access to sugarcane from the West Indies, the French expanded the Prussians' work; breeding beets with an even higher sugar content. After Napoleon's fall and the return of imported sugarcane, the French sugarbeet industry declined; but its viability had been clearly demonstrated.
After some delay, American farmers and businessmen exported the plant to the United States, and in 1879 E. H. Dyer constructed the first commercially successful sugarbeet factory in Alvarado, California. The industry soon exploded. One company, American Beet, quickly established itself as a leader in the sugarbeet industry; building factories throughout the Midwest, the Rocky Mountains and the West Coast.
While American Beet produced tons of fine grade sugar, its name conjured images of unpleasant garden vegetables consumed as a child. Perhaps with this in mind, American Beet forsook their original name and seventy-five years ago this day re-christened themselves the American Crystal Sugar Company.
Crystal Sugar experienced rapid growth through the following decades; establishing additional processing plants in North Dakota and Minnesota. In 1973, the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association purchased American Crystal Sugar and moved its corporate headquarters from Denver to Minnesota. While the organization centralized its operations on the Red River Valley, it expanded its beet processing capacity - building or buying additional factories and expanding its technological capabilities.
Today, American Crystal Sugar is the nation's largest beet sugar refiner; producing not only sugar but also molasses, livestock food pellets, sugarbeet seeds and sugarbeet pulp. Their factories produce roughly 15% of America's highest quality sugar in Drayton and Hillsboro, North Dakota; Crookston, East Grand Forks and Moorhead, Minnesota; and a recently acquired factory in Sidney, Montana, which operates under the name of Sidney Sugars Incorporated.
Dakota Datebook written by Lane Sunwall
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