Is Sugar Vegan? Bone Char Explained

Sugar comes from plants: sugar cane or sugar beet. So why does it appear on lists of ingredients vegans question? The answer is a refining step used by some US cane sugar producers, which filters the sugar through bone char.

What is bone char, and why is it used?

Bone char is made by heating animal bones, usually from cattle, at very high temperatures until they turn to a porous carbon. Some cane sugar refineries pass raw sugar syrup through bone char to remove color and impurities, which is how they make bright white sugar.

The bone char works like a filter: it stays behind, and none of it ends up in the sugar. But the process uses an animal product, so some vegans avoid sugar refined this way.

Which sugar might use bone char?

US sugar brands

The Vegetarian Resource Group reported in 2021 that ASR Group, which makes Domino, C&H and Florida Crystals, had about 65% of its sugar coming from bone-char-free refineries. Its Baltimore, Yonkers and South Bay (Florida) refineries don't use bone char; its Crockett (California) and Arabi (Louisiana) refineries did. According to the company, packs with lot numbers starting with 1, 4 or 6 come from bone-char-free refineries.

Florida Crystals' organic and natural cane sugars are bone-char-free. Any sugar labelled USDA organic is too.

Sugar in Ireland and the UK

Here, you don't need to worry. No major UK sugar company is known to use bone char. Tate & Lyle refines imported cane sugar without it, and British Sugar's Silver Spoon is made from British sugar beet, which doesn't need it. Most Irish supermarket sugar comes from these producers or from European beet sugar.

One thing to check: some icing sugars, like royal icing sugar, contain dried egg white, which isn't vegan.

How we treat sugar in our verdicts

Food manufacturers often buy sugar from several refineries and can't always say whether a particular batch was bone-char filtered. Avoiding sugar in every packaged food would be close to impossible, and it wouldn't send a clear signal to anyone. So we:

• mark sugar as a grey area on product pages, rather than a reason to call something non-vegan;
• say when a product is from the US, where bone char is possible;
• leave the decision to you.

Many vegans buy beet, organic or bone-char-free sugar for baking at home and don't worry about it in packaged foods.

Other sweeteners vegans ask about

The bottom line

Sugar is plant-based. In the US, some white cane sugar is filtered with bone char; beet, organic and unrefined sugars aren't. In Ireland and the UK, sugar isn't processed with bone char at all.