About Us
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About Us
Our Businesses
Investors
Responsibility
Media
Our culture of innovation to improve manufacturing processes and make the most of our raw material sits firmly alongside our belief that there is no such thing as waste. Today, we operate highly efficient bio-refineries that enable us to take our natural feedstock, sugar beet and sugar cane, and turn them into a range of products.
Our businesses operate in a number of different countries with a wide variation in crop availability, infrastructure, technology, trade routes, market and consumption growth rates, and many more factors. Our bio-refineries are able to maximise the value from our operations, a capability hugely important to our financial performance and competitive position.
We have four main product categories: sugar, animal feed, biofuels and speciality products. All have been developed by consistent investment and, combined with technology, we serve many industries including agriculture, horticulture, pharmaceuticals and renewable energy. In addition we play a significant role as a generator of renewable power.
The diagram illustrates how we take our sugar-making process at British Sugar and deploy it to make other products. The sugar making process is at the heart of our plants and has been adapted, with investment, to produce other products.
From a feedstock of some eight million tonnes of sugar beet, we produce not only a range of sugars but are also a major producer of animal feed, one of the largest ethanol producers in the UK, and we produce raffinate and betaine, which are used in the petrochemical and pharmaceutical sectors. We use biomethane, produced from our fermented sugar beet pulp, to generate electricity, and we use the carbon dioxide and low grade heat generated by our operations to grow medicinal cannabis in our huge greenhouse at Wissington, Norfolk, for use in children’s medicine.
The price of sugar in our markets is determined by regional factors of supply and demand and varies accordingly over time. The benefit of an increasingly diverse revenue base, as a result of these other products, is a reduction in our exposure to cyclical swings to sugar prices in the regions where we operate.
British Sugar has maximised production of ethanol at our Wissington plant, benefitting from the strong ethanol market. Derived from sugar beet, ethanol is made available to be blended with petrol to produce E5 and E10 car fuel, the use of which is mandated by governments to reduce fossil fuel usage.
Significant revenue comes from our horticulture business. At our Glasshouse, which is the size of 13 football pitches, we grow a non-psychoactive variety of cannabis that is specially cultivated for medical purposes. There is the potential for further growth demand from the pharmaceutical sector for this crop and we are investigating how we can expand capacity.
As a significant renewable power generator we export electricity surplus to our requirements to the local grids.
This year the contribution from these revenue streams increased significantly and has come close to the contribution from our sugar products.
In Spain, Azucarera has a speciality liquid plant adjacent to its sugar plant in Toro. This plant produces some 10,000 tonnes of liquid and invert sugars annually and, by using enzymes, it also produces prebiotics, such as certain oligosaccharides, which are used to produce a range of customised blends.
Our ‘Betalia’ range is used in animal feed, agricultural fertilisation and industrial applications. An excellent example is within the area of plant nutrition where a range of organic fertilisers is now available as an alternative to conventional fertilisers. Sales of this range have steadily increased driven by brand loyalty, as well as the quality and performance of the products.
Another product specialty is ‘Betaferm’, a substrate with a high sugar content for the cultivation of microorganisms. It is sold directly to pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries which use it in a number of well-known consumer brand.
Coming back to the sugar-making process, we have also seen an increase in the use of sucrose from sugar beet to create a liquid sucrose product which aids bee nutrition as its composition mimics the formula of honey.
All of these diverse products provide valuable revenue streams, alongside industrial and consumer sugar sales.
The natural feedstock for our biorefineries at Illovo is sugar cane. We produce furfural and its derivatives from residual cane stalks, known as bagasse, at Sezela, in South Africa. Each year we produce some 20,000 tonnes of furfural, an important and natural chemical feedstock used in numerous applications in food and other industries. We also produce flavourants, used to add flavour to foods such as butter. Molasses, another by-product of the sugar manufacturing process, is used as the fermentation feedstock to produce pharmaceutical and industrial grade alcohols as well as ethyl alcohol for both local and export markets for the drinks industry. Around 65,000 litres are produced in South Africa and Tanzania alone. Finally, we generate electricity from bagasse which provides up to 70% of the company’s annual power requirement. We export surplus power to national grid as we do in the UK, predominantly in this case in Eswatini, supplying some 60 gigawatt hours to the grid every year.
We will continue to make the most of sugar beet and sugar cane and we intend to grow our portfolio of renewable products even further. We believe there are significant opportunities ahead, particularly for renewable power generation.
We know that our plans to improve the efficiency and productivity of our production processes will be closely aligned to both decarbonisation and the expectations and needs of our customers.