Thursday, March 17, 2011
Roll Up for the Magical Factory Tour!
Written by
Chad
What if Tana finds herself plumb out of confectionery sugar halfway through icing my annual nine-layer birthday cake? Or what if we're having sea pirates over for dinner and realize last-second that stock is short on rum? Fortunately enough, our next door neighbor has the hookups. We're just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Burkina's largest and only sugar factory: Societé Sucriere de la COMOE (SOSUCO).
With over four thousand employees, SOSUCO is to Banfora what Hershey Chocolate is to Hershey, PA. So imagine our giddiness when last week we got golden tickets granting us entry inside the industrial megaplex. This birthplace of all sticky buns and lemon drops; this wonderland of tooth decay and type two diabetes. Today, you too can behold the secret world of imagination that is SOSUCO. Think of Tana as a clownishly dressed Willy Wonka and me as a sun-burnt Oompa Loompa, guiding you through the ten-step process of sugar production. Grab your insulin, cause here we go.
(3) Then it goes to the coolest part ever. While it's being spritzed with water, the paste spins around a centrifuge. You can open it up and watch the sugar crystallize, visibly changing color like a splash of cream in your coffee. At that moment a fleeting sense of appreciation for the miracles of science welled up in my chest, kind of like seeing one of those volcano science fair projects. It may have just been acid reflux.
With over four thousand employees, SOSUCO is to Banfora what Hershey Chocolate is to Hershey, PA. So imagine our giddiness when last week we got golden tickets granting us entry inside the industrial megaplex. This birthplace of all sticky buns and lemon drops; this wonderland of tooth decay and type two diabetes. Today, you too can behold the secret world of imagination that is SOSUCO. Think of Tana as a clownishly dressed Willy Wonka and me as a sun-burnt Oompa Loompa, guiding you through the ten-step process of sugar production. Grab your insulin, cause here we go.
(10) I have reverse-numbered these steps for no reason. The journey from cane to cubes begins out in the fields where the workers unleash a raging inferno upon the unsuspecting crop. This is a technique borrowed from the Brazil, perhaps along with their cultural obsession for soccer. Here workers pile the chopped, char-grilled stalks onto freight trailers towed by John Deere tractors.
(9) Back at the factory, a crane empties all of the medium-rare stalks into the assembly line by lifting the chain beneath them.
(8) Here the cane is rinsed to remove residue from the burning. Maybe the sugarcane is enjoying this warm bath. Maybe it's about to forgive the company for burning it alive and decapitating it with machetes. But don't forgive them just yet, sugarcane. Unspeakable things are about to happen to you...
(7) At this point, the cane is threshed by a gauntlet of rotary blades (pictured below) into a coarsely shredded wood pulp. High upon this catwalk, one misstep could land a careless passerby into the throes of whirling blades or scalding molten sugar. Our tour guide Abdoulaye wore safe industrial attire and a hard hat while Tana and I in our visitor badges scaled the slippery catwalks in Kohls flip flops. Living life on the edge is just how we roll. And I'm thankful mom and dad taught me to walk really well back in kindergarten.
(6) Onward, the pulp continues through the pipeline, passing through six mills, each with one rotating cylinder on top and two below. The pulp is continually rinsed with recirculated juice. The goal here is to juice the living daylights out of the pulp, kind of like trying to squeeze those last few atoms of toothpaste out of an empty tube. The juice drips into a trough proceeding down the rabbit hole.
(5) Now that they've leached all the sweetness from the pulp, the byproduct is saw dust. It leaves the factory on a conveyer belt straight for the stockpile of furnace fuel. SOSUCO goes through 25,000 liters of water per hour pumped from a nearby mountaintop spring. If it helps you visualize the quantity better, that's the equivalent 25,000 one-liter cokes or one 25,000-liter coke per hour.
(4) The juice is decanted and refined through slowly spinning cylinders, filtering out the remaining debris and impurities. What remains is a syrup. The syrup runs through four more towering cylinders that boil it to different temperatures. It comes out as a paste called mesquite. For quality assurance, workers view the sugar crystals through a microscope lens.
In this room, the steam from these machines sugarcoats all the pipes and metalworks in a brown glaze. Dangling from all the machines are brown icicle-like stalactites. The air smells amazing. Inhaling it all the time, I bet the employees are on a perpetual sugar rush.
(3) Then it goes to the coolest part ever. While it's being spritzed with water, the paste spins around a centrifuge. You can open it up and watch the sugar crystallize, visibly changing color like a splash of cream in your coffee. At that moment a fleeting sense of appreciation for the miracles of science welled up in my chest, kind of like seeing one of those volcano science fair projects. It may have just been acid reflux.
(2) Then through a series of tubes (much like the internet), the wet sugar passes through a dehydration room, which looks like it got a light dusting of snow. As you walk through, the song "It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas" might pop into your head.
(1) The end of the tour is the packaging warehouse where the sugar meets one of two fates: cartons full of cubes or sacks of the granular variety.
We were allowed to eat as many sugar cubes as we could while inside the compound, so our impoverished eleven-year-old buddy Abu who tagged along shoveled as many as possible into his gullet. I dramatically handed a sugar cube back to my tour guide (like Charlie does with the everlasting gobstopper), but unfortunately Abdoulaye refused to show us the Wonkavator.
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