This week’s meeting saw our Bury St Edmunds group donning PPE for a tour of the town’s British Sugar factory – The Cloud Factory, as it is known locally, for good reason… ☁️☁️
One of the four sugar beet factories in the UK, and being established in 1925, the company is marking the BSE factory’s Centenary by offering a series of organised tours during this winter’s campaign, with the opportunity to donate in support of the local hospice.
Our large group of 18 was lucky enough to be guided around the factory from start to finish of the sugar-making process by the factory manager, Andy Simms, whose knowledge and enthusiasm were both impressive and entertaining.
Having been instructed to discard our own shoes, hats, jewellery, false nails and eyelashes(!), we were supplied with safety shoes, hi-vis jackets, gloves, ear defenders, safety glasses, and hard hats – which we placed at varying degrees of jauntiness – and led out into the noise and (as it was a wet day) the mud of the outdoor part of the process, where lorries were constantly bringing in their loads of beet from the farms of Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire.
From there, we saw how the beet are washed of stones, sand and silt, sliced into tiny strips (‘cossettes’) and mixed with hot water in diffuser towers to extract the sucrose. 
Indoors, the resulting ‘thin juice’ is purified using a ‘lime milk’, filtered, turned into ‘thick juice’ by heating, and eventually seeded with tiny sugar crystals, which grow into the required size. 
The sugar crystals are then washed to their natural white, dried and cooled. So much of it is automated, controlled from a couple of rooms with banks of screens monitoring all the processes, that it is quite mind-boggling.
The company are impressive in the use they make of the beet, aiming for near-zero waste.
Stones, sand and topsoil are washed off at the cleaning stage, collected and sold; beet pulp is dried, compressed and made into pellets for animal feed; some sugar is fermented into bioethanol, with food-grade CO2 captured for the drinks industry; the jet engine on site generates electricity for the factory, exporting any surplus.
All in all, it was a brilliant and most memorable experience, enjoyed by all. There was far more to it than any of us really imagined, and with the goody-bag we were supplied with at the end, we have never, ever owned so much sugar in our lives!!
