Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/8793
FRom The ASA by Phillip Hayes | DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS AS A MEDIA SPOKESPERSON for the sugar industry, I talk to reporters a lot. And right now, they all seem to want to talk about one thing: sugar prices. Many are confused about the difference between highly volatile world sugar prices, which have ranged from 6 cents to 30 cents per pound in the past five years, and U.S. prices, which tend to remain much steadier. Others want to know if candy bars will get prohibitively expensive now that sugar prices have temporarily recovered from being in the doldrums for the better part of two decades. All seem relieved when I point out one amazing fact: Sugar remains so inexpen- sive that you can literally walk into any res- taurant in the country and fill your pockets with sugar packets for free. Of course, the sugar industry would never suggest that people pilfer our product from restaurants. There’s really no need to. Despite the recent price recovery, you can still walk into any grocery store and pick up a whole pound of sugar for a lot less than that chocolate bar will cost you. Coin- cidentally, there’s only about 2 cents worth of sugar in a 99-cent chocolate bar. Stats like these are pretty remarkable when you think about it. Sugar—an ingre- dient found in 70 percent of manufactured foods—remains so cheap, it is literally given away. One would assume then that sugar must be pretty easy to produce. Wrong. It is incredibly labor intensive and expensive to take sugar from the field to the shelf. Here’s a quick look at the sugarbeet process: A loan officer at the bank examines detailed business plans to determine whether or not to loan a farmer enough money to grow that year’s crop. Fields are cultivated. Beet seeds are planted. Crops are sprayed to beat back weeds and critters. Machinery breaks down and is re- paired. Producers pray that Mother Nature will cooperate. Harvest starts and runs 24 hours a day for the better part of a month. It’s been months and months of stress, but you’re nowhere near a free sugar packet yet. Beets are hauled to piling sta- tions and stacked high for storage. They are sliced and squeezed to extract sugar juice, then cleaned, boiled and finally crystallized. Still no sugar packet. Sophisticated machinery and a team of employees pack- age, sort and load sugar onto trucks and railcars for delivery. Oh yeah, there’s also a slew of marketers and logistics gurus who sell the sugar and figure out how to get it to different parts of the country at the exact time it is needed. Cane sugar starts the same. Loans are approved, cane is planted and nurtured, prayers are said, tensions run high and harvest begins (usually just after an inevitable hurricane or tropical storm has blown in). Then things get really interesting. Trucks take cane stalks to a mill, where it has to be processed within 24 hours before it goes sour. Stalks are squeezed and sugar juice is extracted. The juice is boiled, crystallized and the resulting brown sugar is placed in a huge warehouse in preparation of a big journey. Next, raw cane sugar is loaded onto railcars or barges to be shipped hundreds of miles to one of eight refineries in the country. There it’s melted down again and placed in a centrifuge to remove molasses before heading down to packaging and delivery. In other words, there are a lot of man- hours that go into a single sugar packet. That should give folks something to think about the next time they are com- plaining about high sugar prices while sipping a $3 latte or cappuccino. By the way, they give sugar away for free at coffee houses, too. n 22 Sugar Producer APRIL 2010