For centuries, sugar beet modestly concealed its virtues.
In 1600, the French agronomist Olivier de Serres noted that the “root” recently arrived from Italy, when cooked rendered up a juice “similar to sugar syrup”. But it was not until 1747 that the Berlin chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf proved that beet sugar and cane sugar were identical.
In 1798 his pupil Franz Carl Achard produced the first beet sugar. With financial support from King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, he set up the first sugar factory in Silesia, but it was not a resounding success. Achard had succeeded in extracting the sugar. His only mistake was to believe that the consistency of the beet sugar would increase during storage, when in fact the opposite was true. As a result, the quality of the product was poor and profit margins were too small.
In 1810, there was a revival of interest in sugar beet in France under the influence of Chaptal, a member of an Institut de France commission charged with reviewing Achard’s experiments. Reporting to Napoleon, the commission outlined the benefits that France could derive from producing its own sugar.