Farmers bitter at Tate & Lyle Sugars’ Made in Britain packaging

FARMERS have accused Tate & Lyle Sugars, the food giant, of misleading shoppers by putting a Made in Britain logo on its sugar grown in plantations around the world from Belize to Brazil.

The American-owned company promotes its bags of white granulated pure cane sugar with a Union flag on its packaging, which states: “Made in the UK since 1878.” Foreign-grown sugar cane for the UK market is processed in local mills where it is pressed to extract juice. The juice is then crystallised into raw sugar for shipping to a London refinery.

The National Farmers’ Union this weekend called for a fresh review of grocery products marketed with the British flag. Michael Sly, chairman of the NFU Sugar Board, said: “British farmers supply over 50 per cent of all sugar consumed in the UK, produced to the highest environmental standards.

“The Made in Britain logo this cane sugar carries may mislead shoppers into believing it is grown by our farmers.” Britons consume about 5,000 tons of sugar a day. British Sugar is the country’s leading sugar producer and its factories are supplied by about 3,000 sugar beet farmers in the UK.

The Tate & Lyle Sugars refinery in Silvertown, east London, has an annual capacity of 1.2 million tons and is the largest sugar refinery in Europe.

Tate & Lyle Sugars sponsored the Tory party conference in 2017 and wrote a letter to its workforce before the EU referendum backing Brexit. A spokesman said: “Our factories in east London have been making sugar and syrups for over 140 years, employing generations of local people in good quality jobs.

“Unfortunately, this is another attempt to undermine and belittle those factories and the 850 people that work in them. It is no coincidence that this comes at a time when the UK is deciding how to correct the decades-long discrimination that cane refining faced in the EU, seeing it tightly restricted whilst the beet sugar industry benefited from generous subsidies and deregulation.”

A Defra spokesman said: “Our sugar beet farmers provide a key harvest which is vitally important for UK sugar production, and we expect the origin of all British sugar to be labelled in a way which is clear to the consumer.”