21 March 2025

2025 start of thick juice campaign at the Nordzucker factory in Nordstemmen

The Nordzucker site in Nordstemmen starts its thick juice campaign on 24 March. During the beet campaign that ended last month, not all of the beet was processed into granulated sugar, but some of it was stored as thick juice, an intermediate product in the extraction of sugar. During this campaign, which is now starting and will last for around two months, sugar will be crystallized from the thick juice. The advantage of the downstream thick juice campaign is that it enables Nordzucker to respond more specifically to customer requests for particular products and crystal sizes.

At the start of the thick juice campaign, the factory employees test the boilers and turbines for function and safety. “When the factory facilities are started up, there may be a brief increase in noise, so we ask our local residents for their understanding as a precaution,” says Elmar Kuhnt, Head of factory in Nordstemmen.

Nordzucker has set up its GoGreen sustainability programme with the aim of halving its CO₂ emissions by 2030 compared to the base year 2018 and making all production in its factories CO₂-neutral by 2050. Customised roadmaps tailored to the sites help to utilise the energy used in sugar production more efficiently and to reduce additional CO₂ emissions. In Nordstemmen, vapour recompression is used during the campaign. In this process, steam that has already been used several times is recharged with energy in special compressors. Reused as heating steam, the process saves energy and CO₂ overall. The second stage of vapour recompression will be completed at the factory during the course of the year.

Nordzucker also runs a thick juice campaign at the Nordzucker production site in Trenčianska Teplá, Slovakia. There, sugar production begins about a week later, at the beginning of April. After the thick juice campaign the factories are prepared for the next beet campaign in the autumn.