Amalgamated Sugar uses silos and tanks to store two different materials—granulated sugar and “thick juice.”  Granulated white sugar is stored in the taller, narrower silos.  The Mini-Cassia factory uses two different types of silos with increased capacity.  The six silos at Mini-Cassia hold over 50,000 tons of granulated sugar.  Nampa and Twin Falls factories, as well as the Nyssa facility, use the same type of tall, narrow silo for granulated sugar storage.  Nampa has twelve silos, and Twin Falls has seven, with a total capacity for each location of 24,000 to 42,000 tons of sugar.

 

 

 

 

Sugar is taken out of the silos as it is sold, packaged, and transported out of the factory.  The “beet slice campaign,” or sugarbeet processing period, runs from September to early April.  Over the course of a campaign, each silo is filled and emptied an equivalent of four to eight times.

 

 

 

 

Granulated sugar is not the only product stored in tanks or silos at each factory. Since sugarbeets are sliced faster than the factories can make sugar, the factories store concentrated sugar juice that is partway towards the granulation process.  This product is called “thick juice” and is stored in the shorter, wide tanks until it can be brought back into the factory to be granulated.

 

After the beet campaign, the thick juice from the storage tanks is pumped back into the factory and converted to sugar crystals. This processing period is called “juice run” and lasts about four to six months, running from early spring through the end of summer. The ability to store thick juice for granulation after the sugarbeet campaign allows Amalgamated Sugar factories to produce sugar year-round.

 

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