Sugar Innovation

Sugar was first discovered and extracted from sugar cane thousands of years ago. Around 2,000 years ago, the first manufacturing processes turned cane sugar into sugar loaves. The spread of cultivation in the medieval era in the Islamic world led to the upscaling of manufacture and production methods. During the 16th century, cultivation of cane sugar in the West Indies and the Americas began. In the 19th and 20th centuries came the development of sugar from beet. It was the changes in production methods creating increased production that changed sugar from a ‘fine spice’ to the cheaper commodity it became in the 19th and 20th centuries.