a color story: white sugar and brown sugar

A ramakin, filled with white and brown cubed sugars, sparkled in their containers. They looked ready to be put into tea cups.  The golden, brown sugar seemed artificial even though it was sugar. 

I searched for the original packaging and looked at their labels. Oddly enough,  one labelled as a refined natural sugar. While the other labeled as a plantation raw sugar. 

How odd?

The white sugar was natural? I thought it was bleached? Why does this golden, brown sugar not look raw?

The confusing labels required more investigating. 

Green. 

Most sugar comes from sugar canes. 

Brown

Once you boil it. You get sugar with molasses (thick brown natural byproduct). 

White

Spin the impurities out in a centrifuge. 

I googled white sugar. Its 99.9 percent sucrose; it was refined to get to that purity. I googled raw sugar. It gets its colors from molasses, caramel flavor by-product of sugar.  Then, brown sugar was the one that clumps; it contained even more molasses than raw sugar. 

Initially, I thought the white sugar was bleached, because it was noticeably  white. Not an off-white. Not a light shade of white. Sugar was naturally white. I compared sugar to salt for their similar white, crystal structures.  Table salt was bleached to get rid of impurities (a similar process to refining sugar) which would ultimately increase its shelf life. Salt was not salt. Our table salt was refined salt. Refined sugar was, however,  natural sugar. 

Then, what was raw sugar if it was not natural? Why did that look it was something that it wasn't?

Then I reviewed the sugar cubes once again. They both had the same amount of calories per portion. They both even had the same sparkle on them with different backgrounds. Why do I feel like the molasses, the ingredient that provides the brown hue to the sugar cube, doesn't tell a convincing story? Is raw sugar a brown cube if a natural sugar was white?

I assumed that the brown and "raw" cube went through a color process:

Green-Brown-Light Brown 

A raw product couldn't be a refined product. I thought that raw sugar was a less refined sugar. 

After reading this article, it was. 

Raw sugar isn't even really raw. It's just slightly less refined, so it retains some of the molasses. But there's no real health real benefit from it.

Then, I dug deeper into the rabbit hole of sugar. Plantation Raw was a trademark under the LanticRogers sugar empire. It was their version of less refined sugar. I couldn't find any articles on their sugar making process. It was a secret, of course. But, "plantation raw" trademark sounded like they were adding to the sugar, rather than refining less. For a large company, it would make sense to increase shelf life for the bottom line. I assumed that the sugar was fully refined and "golden" molasses added for their trademark, "plantation raw".

Green - Brown - Light Brown -  Golden? ("plantation raw")

or

Green - Brown - White - Golden?

If so, the story made sense. Sugar was naturally white and the golden, brown sugar cube was faking its "rawness".

In the case of the sugar cubes, I was left with more questions than answers. I don't see anything golden about the "raw" cubes. 

Sugar aren't so empty after all.