• A beet micro-sugar factory, organic, fair trade and local, will be set up in Hauts-de-France.

  • It should produce unrefined granulated sugar by 2024.

  • The cooperative will carry out the purchase of beets, their processing and the marketing of the finished product.

Will they break their backs on sugar?

Bio en Hauts-de-France, the regional group of organic farming, formally launched on Monday a project on which several of its members had been working for a few years already: to set up the first French sector of organic beet sugar, fair, local and sustainable.

At the heart of the system, a micro-sugar factory will produce “complete” granulated sugar, much less controversial than its cousin refined sugar.

The beet sugar industry is a big machine that already draws most of its raw material from Hauts-de-France.

On the surface, beet cultivation extends over 402,000 hectares, the equivalent of nearly 600,000 football fields, all of which is operated by just under 24,000 producers.

The 34 million tons of this tuber produced each year are used to make bioethanol or white sugar, mainly refined in the factories of large groups such as Lessaffre and Tereos.

Even for a micro-sugar factory, you need large agricultural areas

Suffice to say that the newly created cooperative, La FABrique à sucres, does not intend to compete.

This is not the postulate of its founders.

“We will start with a small unit of 400 hectares installed in the region”, assures Sébastien Lemoine, farmer and administrator of the cooperative.

To calculate the production costs and determine the break-even point, it has already been 6 years since plots of organic beets were put into production.

"When in conventional agriculture we produce 90 tons per hectare, in organic, it's almost half as much," he explains.

As a result, even for a micro-sugar factory, you need large areas.

So what's new ?

Nothing for now, organic beet sugar already exists.

Except that the micro-sweet will produce unrefined or whole sugar.

“Refined sugar strips beets of vitamins and minerals.

It assimilates very, very quickly and has no nutritional value,” explains Sébastien Lemoine.

Beyond the nutritional interest of the product, it is the whole sector that will be put in place that will want to be virtuous.

Fair, by remunerating the producers fairly.

Local, by producing and transforming the product in the region.

The main lines are now drawn, the cooperative is now entering the concrete.

The first unit of 400 hectares, in other words the producers, must be located "in the triangle Arras, Cambrai and Lens".

The micro-sugar factory will be installed in the same sector.

Sébastien Lemoine estimates that the entity will be operational for the 2024 beet campaign and that the products will be able to be marketed from October of the same year.

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