Classifying Sugar

A short post about the difficulty of classifying sugar

Posted on: 4 Nov 2025

Introduction

As of right now there are 514,775 products in the database, and 270,330 of them contain some form of sugar! That's over 50%!

Sugar itself is obviously vegan, but the issue is that some cane sugars in the US are processed using bone char (charcoal from animal bones) which some people consider non-vegan. For almost all the ingredients in the database, I have chosen to be conservative and mark items which are possibly non-vegan as "maybe vegan", even if 90+% of the commercial supply of an ingredient does not come from animal sources. However for the case of sugar, we mark it as vegan by default for the following reasons:

  1. The bone char is not in the final sugar product in any appreciable amount
  2. Many companies use vegetable based charcoal already
  3. There are viable vegan alternatives which the market will naturally switch to should more and more people start consuming fewer animals.

For these reasons I chose to make sugar vegan by default in the database, but offer users the ability to change that. Given that users have the ability to change how they treat sugar, I have to distinguish in the database between sugars that are known to be vegan and those that may be processed using bone char.

Different Types of Sugar

I started off with only having three primary ingredients in the database:

  1. Sugar
  2. Cane Sugar
  3. Sugar (vegan)

I decided to separate cane sugar and sugar just for the simple reason that it might make changing things down the line easier.

There are some sugars that are easy to classify like "cane sugar", "brown sugar", and "beet sugar". In these cases, the cane sugar and brown sugar may not be vegan and the beet sugar is definitely vegan.

As I started going through the list of ingredients, it started getting less and less clear which category some of these belonged in. Here are a short list of some sugars that are trickier to categorize:

  1. organic sugar
  2. raw sugar
  3. raw cane sugar
  4. dark brown sugar
  5. unbleached sugar
  6. invert sugar
  7. sugar syrup
  8. cane sugar syrup
  9. cane juice solids
  10. naturally milled sugar
  11. pure brown sugar
  12. all natural cane sugar
  13. biodynamic cane sugar
  14. molasses
  15. evaporated cane juice

In the end, I settled on adding a few more primary categories to the database:

Sugar

This is the generic term for any sugar of unknown origin (i.e. could be cane sugar or beet sugar)

Cane Sugar

This is the category for all sugar that is known to be cane sugar and so could be considered non-vegan, but as far as vegan status it will always be the same as "sugar" (by default vegan unless the user flips a switch in the settings)

Sugar (vegan)

This is the category for all known vegan sugar like "unrefined sugar", "turbinado sugar", etc.

Organic Sugar

This is the category for all organic sugar which as discussed below is vegan

Sugarcane

This is the category for all things related to the sugar cane plant but are not necessarily sugar like "sugarcane fiber", etc. This is always vegan.

Cultured sugar

This is the category for fermented sugar. I separate this because I currently have a column in the database for whether something is ok for Jains to consume, although I don't think I'll ever actually release anything with that because it's so difficult to tell.

Cultured sugar (vegan)

Same as above but guaranteed vegan.

Molasses

A category for molasses since it is likely vegan, but based on some research by the Vegetarian Resource Group Blog, it might not be. This is toggled "maybe" vegan when the user puts sugar to maybe vegan.

Caramel

Basically the same as "sugar", but seems like it deserves it's own primary ingredient based on the number of times it appears in ingredient lists

Caramel color

Basically the same as "sugar", but seems like it deserves it's own primary ingredient based on the number of times it appears in ingredient lists

Organic Sugar

This category represents sugar labelled as organic. I found quite a few sources online talking about how organic sugar was guaranteed to not be processed with bone char, but tracking down definitive sources was tricky. Based on the information on the USDA website it states that:
In organic crop production, nonsynthetic (natural) substances are allowed unless specifically prohibited and synthetic substances are prohibited unless specifically allowed (ยงยง 205.601 - 205.602)

This would seem to suggest that bone char would be allowed by default (it's natural after all), however I later found more specific information in this technical report which suggests that bone char would be considered synthetic (based on the fact that they consider charcoal from vegetable sources to be synthetic). And, if it's considered synthetic, then it's banned by default, and since it's not on the list of allowed ingredients it must not be allowed. This seems like pretty good evidence to me to suggest that organic sugar is indeed processed without bone char. If you're reading this and in the sugar industry or work for the USDA, please get in touch and let me know if I've interpreted this correctly.

So, any sugar labelled as organic gets pointed to the "organic sugar" primary ingredient, which is vegan regardless of the user settings.

Evaporated Cane Juice

At first, when going through the ingredients I assumed that "evaporated cane juice" must be vegan. After all, you can practically picture someone with a giant tarp and their cane juicer out in a field drying the cane juice. However, I later found this article discussing how "evaporated cane juice" is just some dark pattern by product manufacturers to hide that their products contain sugar. After reading this article, I became very skeptical about how I classified things, and was much more hesitant to assume various sugars were processed without bone char.

Biodynamic and Raw Sugar

Both of these also sound like crappy marketing terms like "evaporated cane juice" but I was able to find sources suggesting that they were almost certainly unrefined. The first is this Whole Foods announcement which clearly says:

An unrefined alternative to refined white sugar, biodynamic cane sugar is made from freshly squeezed biodynamic cane juice from Paraguay.

For raw sugar I found this source which says:

While table sugar is white, raw sugar is light brown because it is less refined and, as a result, contains more of the natural molasses present in sugar cane.
This suggests that the term raw sugar is used to represent sugar which is refined but not decolorized which means it is vegan.

Natural and Pure Sugar

These also seem like marketing terms, and I was unable to find anywhere that definitely showed these terms are any different from regular sugar, so they are all classified as "sugar".

Molasses

This one is super complicated since it seems like it would be vegan since molasses is already dark, it must be extracted before any bone char is added. However I found a great article here: https://www.vrg.org/blog/2023/03/22/is-molasses-always-vegan/ suggesting it might not be. The conclusion there is:

Non-organic molasses derived from cane sugar or a combination of cane sugar and beet sugar has gone through a cow bone filter if it were processed in a facility that uses cow bone char filtration. Not all do. Check with the manufacturer to be sure.

For this reason I have a separate molasses primary ingredient which is changed to maybe vegan when the user sets sugar to be maybe vegan.