Brown sugar
Practical Action
If sodium bicarbonate, diluted in raw juice, is added during cooling the product will become
powdery and can be packaged in small bags as a crystal sugar substitute.
Air blower
Flue gas
Concentrated
sugar syrup
Bagasse
Boiling pans
Air in
Clear Juice
Stack
Wet bagasse
combustion
chamber
Preheated air
returned to the
furnace
Recuperator heats
unbombusted air
Figure 1: Multi-pan shell furnace used for
open pan sugar production
Khandsari
A basic raw crystalline sugar, developed in India, that has been separated from most of the
molasses. Khandsari, varies in colour from golden yellow to brown and contains between 94 and
98% sucrose.
It is produced by the small to medium scale sector and has a considerable market in India. At
its most basic, khandsari is manufactured using simple animal-drawn crushers, is subjected to
simple clarification, boiled to the consistency of a thick syrup, and allowed to stand until sugar
crystals are formed. The small crystals are then separated in manually operated centrifuges and
sun dried.
At the other end of the scale, the production plant can use diesel or electrically driven crushers,
crystalliser to ensure even formation of crystals, power-driven centrifuges, and forced-air driers to
dry the product. Factories processing between one and two hundred tonnes of cane per day are
common yielding between 6.5 and 13 tonnes per day respectively.
Medium-scale brown sugar production
Medium-scale sugar processing can use either relatively low-cost labour intensive open pan
sulphitation (OP S) technology or modern vacuum pan (VP) technology. Although OPS is a low-
cost technology compared to VP technology it still requires substantial capital investment in
plant and equipment (for further details see IT Technical Brief - OPS sugar processing). The
following brown sugars are normally produced using modern VP plants but could be produced
using OPS technology.
Demerara sugar
Named after the area in Guyana where it was first produced, demerara is a centrifuged sugar
prepared from the first crystallisation of cane syrup and has large yellow crystals and a slightly
sticky texture. Production of this sugar is not suitable for the small sector as the juice needs to
be carefully clarified to ensure purity and crystalliser are required to ensure uniform grain size.
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