Renan Danielski on using sugar beets for cellular agriculture

So I'm working on sugar beets.

So for those of you who don't know it, sugar beets, they're quite different from table beets, you know, like those little purple ones.

They are white and they are huge.

When they are fully mature, they can weigh up to two kilos.

Are they sold in the grocery store? They

are not.

They are not.

They are an industrial crop.

I see.

Because sugar beets, they are not very exciting in terms of nutritional composition, right? Okay.

So it's pretty much water and sucrose, which we know as table sugar.

Most of the sugar in the world comes from sugar cane.

Mm-hmm.

but not here in Canada because we cannot grow sugar cane.

Sugar cane grows tropical climates and here we have temperate climate.

So sugar beets are more appropriate for the kind of climate we have here in Canada.

A lot of the, let's say, products made in Canada that require sugar, is it being used with sugar beets? Are we extracting from sugar beets to put as the ingredient we use in Canadian production? And like, are there products on our shelves that have sugar beets instead of sugar cane? Or like, to what extent are we eating sugar beets in our day to day lives?

It depends.

Because you see, we have only one sugar beet hub here in Canada, which is southern Alberta.

So sugar beet is mostly produced here and in Ontario.

But the thing is, the sugar beet we produce in Ontario doesn't stay in Canada.

It gets

exported.

So the only sugar that comes from sugar beets for domestic consumption come from the beets that are produced here in southern Alberta.

But most of the sugar you're going to see, you know, like on the grocery store or that serves as ingredients in other food products, they will probably be imported.