CALGARY (Staff) – The campaign of 1994-95 will go down as a banner year for the Taber sugar factory.
- With record sugar beet production coming from the fields, the Alberta Sugar Company saw its typical season stretch from 140 to 180 days, said plant manager Doug Pettriw.
- Sugar is a big industry for southern Alberta where the beets are part of a rotation crop on irrigated farms.
- The plant’s average output is 85,000 to 90,000 tonnes of sugar annually.
- This year they pro-cessed 710,000 tonnes of beets at the rate of 4,000 tonnes of beets per day at peak periods. The plant runs 24 hours a day.
- With the exports shut off to the United States in January, 5,000 tonnes of excess sugar went into storage in Calgary and Edmonton, said Pettriw.
- Products from the plant include refined sugar, icing sugar, liquid sucrose and liquid invert sugar. About half is packaged refined sugar and the rest is used in bulk production for bakeries or soft drink sweetener.
- Most of the sugar pro-cessed at Taber is sold in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
- Besides sugar, leftover beet pulp is made into pellets and used as high fibre cattle feed.
- Molasses, a residue left over from sucrose extractions, is added to the beet pulp to increase energy. It also is a component in the manufacture of yeast.
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