What Really Happens To Sugarcane Before It Becomes Candy?

The extraordinary journey from farm to Chewy Lolly starts in a picturesque place like this, the Clarence Valley area of New South Wales, home to the most southerly cane plantations in Australia. Andrew Fisher and his family have been growing sugarcane here for four generations. These harvesters will harvest several hundred tonne of sugarcane per day. It chops the cane, stalks into what we call billets, and then the cane falls into the buggy which is alongside the harvester. From here the billets make their way to the sugar mill. The Harwood Mill has been crushing cane for over 150 years. Today Matt Clark oversees the delivery and processing of up to 34,000 tonnes of cane billets every week. So this is what's coming in in the bins to being delivered by the cane farmers. What we're after is actually inside. So we prepare the cane or smash it to pieces so that we can maximise the extraction of the juice from the fibre. All the little juice cells on the fibres inside the sugarcane are now able to be extracted more efficiently and if you squeeze it you can see all the juice coming out of it. This sugarcane juice contains up to 20 percent sucrose, making it one of the sweetest plants on the planet. This is our number one mill and you can see the fibre coming through the pressure feeder being forced into the mill. You can see all the juice coming out of the fibre. When I squeeze it it's got a lot more power than I do by doing that of course. At this point the juice is full of dirt and cane fibres so it needs to be cleaned or clarified. So this is our juice clarifier. This is where we add lime to the juice process. And by lime Matt means calcium hydroxide, not the fruit, and this reacts with the dissolved impurities. And you can see the mud interacting with the lime, making particles of mud or flock and you can see them settling to the bottom of the clarifier. The juice is concentrated into a syrup rich in sugar crystals before it's spun in a centrifuge. And that's raw sugar. So roughly eight or nine hours ago that come in as a sugarcane billet and we've been able to turn it into raw sugar. It looks familiar now but there's one final step before the sugar milling process is complete. This is our sugar dryer. We've got to get the moisture off the crystal because raw sugar needs to be dry to store correctly. Essentially it's a great big tumble dryer. Raw sugar can be stored indefinitely but that's not the fate of this batch. It's being sent to the refinery next door to be made into liquid sugar perfect for lollies.