Last Updated on November 9, 2023 by Fasting Planet
Sugar, which Americans consume about 152 pounds of a year, is simply sucrose, often from sugar beets. It sounds vegan, yet you have a few vegan friends who staunchly refuse to eat table sugar. Why is that? Is sugar not vegan?
Sugar can be vegan, but it depends on how it’s manufactured. When sugar is whitened to be commercially appealing, food brands will often use bone char to do it. Since bone char is an animal byproduct, that would make white sugar non-vegan. Brown sugar is sometimes lightened with bone char too.
So how do you know which sugar is safe for vegans to eat versus those that aren’t? In this article, we’ll explain exactly that. By the time you’re done reading, you can continue eating sugar as a vegan if you so choose with greater confidence.
Understanding How Sugar Is Manufactured
Sugar is one of the most popular food products on the planet. The USDA’s 2020 report called Sugar: World Markets and Trade states that between 2009 and 2018, sugar was produced at a whopping rate of 14 percent more than usual. People can’t get enough, maybe yourself included.
How is the sweet stuff made? Well, sugar comes from one of two sources, sugar beet or sugarcane. Sugar beet is a plant species known as the Beta vulgaris that’s naturally very high in sucrose. That’s why such parts of the world as Turkey, Germany, the United States, France, and Russia harvest sugar beets so fervently.
Sugarcane is a plant too, a grass in the Saccharum genus. When fully grown, the grass can reach heights of 20 feet. Those long stalks are naturally rich in sucrose, so they’re harvested frequently to make sugar.
To produce refined sugar–also known as granulated sugar, table sugar, or white sugar–the harvested sugar beet or sugarcane gets sent to a sugar refinery or sugar mill. Sugar beets need refining, as otherwise, you’d still be able to taste beets, but sugarcane does not.
When raw sugar arrives at the refinery, it’s crushed so the pulp and juice are separate entities. By heating the juice, it crystallizes.
Then the sugar undergoes a process called affination. During affination, the raw sugar is combined with a thick syrup. Then it’s centrifuged or separated so it doesn’t have molasses.
The removal of the molasses is important, as that’s part of what gives raw sugar its color. That’s why brown sugar has a different color and taste than white sugar; more of the molasses was intentionally left in. Light brown sugar has 3.5 percent molasses while dark brown sugar has 6.5 percent.
Even table sugar or white sugar was brown at one point, so what makes it white? After the sugar juice is crystallized, bleaching occurs with bone char.
Bone char itself isn’t white, but rather black pucks or pills. Containing carbon (up to 10 percent), calcium carbonate (up to 10 percent), and tricalcium phosphate (up to 80 percent), the bone in bone char is from animals. Pig and cattle bones will get tossed into a vessel that’s warmed up to very high temperatures, more than 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. By reducing concentrations of oxygen, the bone char is more adsorptive.
A little bit of bone char alone cannot make much of a difference in the color of sugar, so manufacturers must use significant amounts. Thus, it takes several animals just to whiten one pack of sugar that you see on grocery store shelves.
Outside of brightening sugar, bone char is used in water treatments since it contains such high quantities of tricalcium phosphate. If you own drawing inks, calligraphic inks, and printmaking supplies, these are all likely darkened with bone char as well.
Which Sugar Is Vegan and Which Sugar Isn’t?
To you, it seems rather simple. White sugar is almost certainly lightened with bone char and should be completely avoided while brown sugar is okay. Yet that’s not exclusively the case.
As you may recall from the last section, brown sugar is not all one uniform shade of brown. Instead, the color is dependent on how much molasses is in the sugar, so it can be darker or lighter.
Yet if you go to the grocery store and buy three boxes of brown sugar, they’re all more or less the same color, right? Yes, because consumers have expectations of certain brands, which means inconsistency is not an option. Thus, food manufacturers will lighten brown sugar with bone char. It doesn’t occur to the same degree as making white sugar, but it still happens.
So is all sugar off-limits as a vegan? Not at all! You just have to shop savvier. The USDA labels certain sugar brands as organic, and those sugars undergo no bone char processing. They might not even be refined, which means the sugar will have a natural brown hue and a more noticeable molasses flavor.
According to the USDA’s blog, “USDA certified organic foods are grown and processed according to federal guidelines addressing, among many factors, soil quality, animal raising practices, pest and weed control, and use of additives.”
They further elaborate on their organic standards in the post. For example, the soil the sugarcane or sugar beets grew in cannot have had any “prohibited substances” applied three years before the plant was harvested. What is a prohibited substance per the USDA? The organization counts pesticides and synthetic fertilizers as potentially dangerous substances.
We’ve written on this blog that food labeling can be incredibly misleading. The USDA though only allows food manufacturers to call a food USDA-certified organic if an ingredient is considered at least 70-percent organic.
Sugar Brands That Vegans Can Safely Shop
We know the information to this point can make it seem like eating sugar is a very restrictive experience for vegans, but it isn’t. The following brands all produce vegan-friendly sugars that do not involve the use of bone char during sugar production.
- Zulka
- Woodstock Farms
- Wholesome!
- Western Sugar Cooperative
- Trader Joe’s
- SuperValu
- Redpath
- Rapunzel
- Now Foods
- Michigan Sugar Company
- Imperial Sugar
- Florida Crystals
- Bob’s Red Mill
- Billington’s
- Big Tree Farms
- In the Raw
Which Sweeteners Are Vegan-Safe?
To sweeten up any meal, your only options aren’t table sugar. You can use all sorts of other vegan sweeteners when making cookies, cakes, pies, and other desserts. Here’s a list to get you started.
Yacon Root Syrup
A daisy species, the yacon root may resemble a sweet potato, but it doesn’t taste starchy like what you’d imagine. Instead, due to its high water content, the flavor of the yacon root is more akin to watermelons or apples than potatoes.
Regarded as a superfood, yacon root is high in fructooligosaccharides like inulin, a prebiotic that isn’t easily digestible. When consumed, inulin can fix your gut probiotics for healthier digestion.
To produce yacon root syrup, its juice is harvested and then reduced until it’s sticky and sweet. You may enjoy the same gut health benefits by consuming yacon root syrup. Other health perks include improved mineral absorption and manageable blood sugar. Inulin and other fructooligosaccharides like it are low on the glycemic index so your blood sugar doesn’t spike after consumption.
Stevia
One of the best-known sugar alternatives, Stevia comes from the Stevia rebaudiana plant, which hails from Paraguay and Brazil. The rebaudiosides and steviosides in Stevia, which are steviol glycosides, are way sweeter than white sugar, at least 30 times more. Stevia can even be as high as 150 times sweeter than table sugar.
Even better is that Stevia doesn’t ferment nor does its stability change much in high heat. Since the glycosides in Stevia don’t metabolize, that’s how Stevia is zero-calorie. The only downside of Stevia is that some people don’t like the aftertaste, which they describe as being like licorice.
Molasses
Molasses is a natural byproduct of sugar beet and sugarcane refining, but it’s not treated with bone char to be darker or lighter. If you have molasses in your kitchen cabinets right now, it’s probably cane molasses, which is the standard for baking. Sugarcane molasses has combinations of fructose, glucose, and sucrose.
A third kind of molasses called unsulfured molasses may be bleached so it’s lighter, but using sulfur dioxide instead of bone char. The dioxide can also prevent bacteria like mold from forming within the molasses.
Maple Syrup
Many maple trees are harvestable to produce maple syrup, including black maple, red maple, and sugar maple trees. Manufacturers procure the xylem sap from these trees in large quantities. The sap forms as part of a yearlong process. First, as the cold season dawns, the maple tree will hold onto starch in its roots and trunk. The starch becomes sugar that’s harvested come spring.
Maple syrup is available in different colors depending on the grade. Grade A maple syrup itself may be one of several colors, either golden, amber, darker brown, or very dark. The darker the syrup, the more pronounced its flavor.
Vegan Honey
Honey as an animal byproduct is not vegan, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up this sticky sweet treat forever. Just switch to vegan honey, which doesn’t involve a single bee. Instead, a combination of inulin, turmeric, and echinacea may be infused into the product to give it that texture and flavor you expect of honey.
Agave
Our last suggestion is agave, a plant-based nectar that comes from the agave cactus. It takes upwards of seven years for the agave plant to grow leaves that are large enough to harvest, sometimes double that. Each leaf has a core known as the pina where the juice can be drained from.
Filtering and heating occur so the polysaccharides in the agave are made into more enjoyable simple sugars. Agave comes in different colors indicative of how much time the syrup spent in processing.
Conclusion
White sugar or common table sugar starts as raw sugar in a natural light brown hue. Food manufacturers will use bone char bleaching to produce that noticeably white color, which makes table sugar unsafe for vegans to consume. That’s even true of some brown sugars.
Whether you shop the organic sugar brands we listed (which are all bone char-free) or switch to another sweetener altogether, you can still satisfy your sweet tooth as a vegan!