Every story has a beginning. This one began in ancient times when the high-energy food was a matter of survival. The stone age murals (12,000 BC) depicting a honey collecting woman and the Melanesia findings (where sugar cane was well-known at the time) can prove this. Additionally, the ancient people cultivated maple trees to produce sugar syrup. In Europe sugar beet became popular in the 18th century after one revolutionary discovery.
Several attempts for the sugar output to get a "royal" blessing have been made but success came by chance in 1747 when the Berlin naturalist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf discovered the sugar crystals in thin beet slices by a microscope.
But the real breakthrough came from one of his students - Franz Carl Achard, who has been trying for years to create a pure white beet containing 5-7% of sugar. When this happened, he succeeded in convincing Friedrich Wilhelm III how profitable this produce could be. And that’s how it all started.
Achard invested the King's award for the first 800 kg sugar in the building of a sugar factory near Silesia - now considered the first sugar beet factory in the world. So from a food for the God-elect sugar became a product accessible to a wider range of people and the technology spread across Europe. The first sugar beet processing plant in the lands of today's Austria was opened in 1803 by Johann Rhys in St. Pölten. Sugar refineries appeared also in Bohemia and France.
During Napoleon's continental blockade sugar suddenly became again a deficient and expensive item. That is why the Old Continent returned to sugar cane, which was significantly cheaper.
