It's all about the beets, 'bout the beets...
     - Meghan Trainor, 2014

The Garver Feed Mill sits on the east side of Madison, close to the Olbrich Botanical Gardens and adjacent to Starkweather Creek. The renovated mill is a venue for events and home to a variety of commercial establishments. From 1931 to 1975, it operated as the Garver Supply Company and, under different ownership, as the Garver Feed and Supply Company until 1997. [1] 

But the building was not constructed as a feed mill. It was originally built in 1906 as a sugar factory by the United States Sugar Company. The sugar factory operated for almost twenty years before closing in 1924. The factory was heavily modified by agricultural entrepreneur James Garver when he purchased it in 1929 and converted it into a commercial feed mill. [1] The photo accompanying this post shows that the top two floors of the old sugar factory, along with its smokestacks, were removed. 

But why was there a sugar factory in Wisconsin? 

Americans are addicted to sugar but probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about where it comes from. Sugar cane? Corn? Underground mines? 

The US produces a lot of sugar. From October 2023 to September 2024, the US (including Puerto Rico) produced 9.25 million short tons of it, equivalent to 18.5 billion pounds. [2] But the country consumes more than it produces. In 2024, sugar deliveries for domestic consumption totaled about 23 billion pounds, or 67 pounds per person. [2] This means the US must import 4.5 billion pounds of sugar each year to meet demand, about 20 percent of the total. [3][4]

The situation was different in the late 1800s. Back then, the US produced less than 30 percent of the sugar it consumed. [5] What accounts for the change over time? It’s all about the beets! Beet sugar as a percentage of total US sugar production has increased steadily over the last few decades. About 56 percent of US sugar now comes from beets, with sugar cane accounting for the rest. [2]

Beet sugar isn’t made from the common purple beet – Beta vulgaris – used in borscht and other dishes. Sugar beets are off-white in color. An ideal sugar beet looks like a fat parsnip and weighs one to two pounds. Sugar beets have been selectively bred to enhance their sucrose content, starting with pioneering work in Germany in the 1800s. They are considered a cultivar classified as Beta vulgaris var. saccharifera.

Herbert Myrick’s 1899 book, The American Sugar Industry: A practical manual on the production of Sugar Beets and Sugar Cane, and on the manufacture of Sugar therefrom, contains everything you might want to know about the beet sugar industry in the US at the time the Madison plant was built. [6] There are sections on agricultural practices, manufacturing methods, expected profits, starting a sugar factory, history and progress of the sugar industry, ideal climates and soils, and economic policies favoring beet sugar production. There are also plenty of pictures of sugar beets. 

The beet sugar industry in the US began after the Civil War, which crippled the South’s cane sugar economy that relied on slave labor. Beets were an alternative source of sugar in other parts of the country where sugar cane wouldn’t grow. But it took some time for sugar producers to adapt to beets, which had largely been ignored as a source of sugar prior to that time. It wasn’t until almost 1900 that sugar production from beets really took off.

Extracting sugar from beets was not easy and factories contained a lot of expensive equipment. First, a beet elevator moved the beets to the top floor, where they were washed and cut into ribbons called cossettes by a mechanical slicer. The cossettes were then dropped into “diffusion batteries” filled with hot water. As the water circulated through the diffusion batteries, sugar was released from the beets by osmosis. Circulation continued until the water, now more appropriately called beet juice, reached the required density.

After this, the juice was treated with lime to make it less acidic, then bubbled with carbonic acid gas to precipitate out the lime and other impurities. After filtering, the juice was treated with sulfur fumes as a preservative and reduced down by evaporation. The resulting thick beet syrup, called massecuite, was then boiled to crystalize the sugar, sent through a centrifuge to get rid of excess liquid, and finally dried. 

If you think it sounds like it took a lot of beets to make beet sugar, you would be correct! Next week, we’ll examine beet sugar production methods used at the Madison factory.

Sources and Notes

[1] National Register of Historic Places, 2017, Garver's Supply Company Factory and Office. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/f948e49b-da61-4c12-bb88-991279562b8d

[2] US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Sugar and Sweeteners Yearbook Tables. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/sugar-and-sweeteners-yearbook-tables

[3] High-fructose corn syrup, honey and other sweeteners contributed an additional 54 pounds per person.

[4] A statistical warning is necessary. Sugar deliveries are not the same as sugar consumption. Consumption accounts for spoilage, food that is not eaten and losses that occur at various stages along the supply chain. Actual US sugar consumption was about 39 pounds per person per year in 2024. (Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, honey and other sweeteners was about 21 pounds per year.) Thirty-nine pounds per year is a lot of sugar for one person, but probably not the highest consumption on the planet. The exact numbers are hard to come by, due to differences in terminology, reporting methods and data reliability. It’s not easy to track the global movement of sugar from farm to mouth. 

[5] Douglas A. Irwin, 2014, Tariff Incidence: Evidence from U.S. Sugar Duties, 1890-1930. National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. 

[6] Herbert Myrick, 1899, The American Sugar Industry: A practical manual on the production of Sugar Beets and Sugar Cane, and on the manufacture of Sugar therefrom, Orange Judd Co., NY. Myrick was also author of, Sugar, a New and Profitable Industry in the United States, for Agriculture, Capital and Labor, to Supply the Home Market with $100,000,000 of Its Product.