The sugar-beet was known as a garden vegetable and for cattle fodder before it was valued for its sugar. As early as the 1500s, however, we come across the first accounts of the sweet juice obtained from boiling these plants.

It was not until the 1700s that the sugar-beet industry made its first simple beginnings. The idea came from a German scientist, Marggraf.

In 1747 he obtained 50 grams of pure sugar by treating 200 grams of dried root of beet with crude ethyl alcohol. Other scientists took up the experiments. Governments donated land and money for further research to be carried out and the first sugar beet factory was built in Silesia in 1803.

Eventually, by the 1850s, beet sugar was able to compete with cane sugar. Today about a quarter of the world’s sugar is produced from sugar-beet.