Râperie

A râperie consists of:[2][3] In a final step before transport, some milk of lime is added to the raw juice to prevent oxidation.

These constraints severely limited the flow of resources to a sugar factory, which was a major concern for the owners.

In e.g. the Netherlands and Flanders, a wagon only had to make a very short trip from the field to one of the many boats which sailed a finely grained network of canals.

In short, the main problem that limited the scale of a sugar factory in an area without a fine grained network of canals, was the huge cost of transport by wagon.

The high transport cost caused that most of the French beet sugar factories could not achieve the scale at which it was profitable to invest in more modern machinery.

[4] This is how the idea for a division of labour between a central sugar factory and outlying râperies, which would feed it with raw juice, came up.

The juice was then transported to the sugar factory by means of an underground cast iron pipe line, which was the real invention.

[8] The introduction of the râperie led to a profound change in the sugar industry, in particular in France and southern Belgium.

The small râperies eliminated the high transport cost of sugar beet in areas that had no waterways.

The decentral râperies processed only a limited tonnage of beet in comparison to the increased scale of sugar factories.