A guide to Ragus specialist sugar and syrup ingredients 

Choosing the right sugar or syrup ingredient is about more than just sweetness. For food and beverage manufacturers, as well as bakers and confectioners, understanding the functional role of different industrial sugar ingredients can make all the difference to product consistency, quality, and flavour. 

This guide explores Ragus’ specialist sugar and syrup ingredients—from cane molasses and golden syrup to muscovado and brewers’ sugars. It explains what they are, how they’re made, and how their unique properties support specific functions in recipes and industrial formulations. 

Food-grade cane molasses starts as a by-product of refining sugarcane into crystalline sugar, which undergoes further processing at our Slough factory. It contains natural sugars, trace elements, and minerals, contributing to its rich, bittersweet flavour and dark colour. Black treacle is produced by blending cane molasses with refiners syrup, which gives it a smoother, more rounded taste profile and thicker consistency. 

Cane molasses has strong colouring properties and a distinctive flavour. It is commonly used in barbecue sauces, caramel products, and certain confectionery applications like liquorice, as well as in brewing stouts and porters. It also functions as a colourant in many syrup formulations and blended crystalline sugars. 

Black treacle, with its dark, robust flavour, is used in baking—especially in gingerbread and fruit cakes—and adds depth of flavour and moisture in various confectionery applications. 

Full invert sugar syrup is made by inverting sucrose into glucose and fructose, typically using acid or enzymes. Partial invert syrups, such as golden syrup, are produced through a similar process but with a lower conversion rate, leaving a higher proportion of unconverted sucrose. Golden syrup also undergoes the Maillard reaction during manufacturing, which results in its distinctive amber colour and mild, buttery taste. 

Full invert syrup is highly soluble, prevents crystallisation in fondants and ice creams, and retains moisture—ideal for soft-textured baked products. It is widely used in confectionery, preserves, and some beverages, such as soft drinks and as a source of sugar in brewing. 

Golden syrup, with a milder sweetness and rich golden hue, is used in baking, cereals, and sauces. Refiners syrup, another partial invert, is often used as a base in other blended syrups, for example to manufacture black treacle when blended with molasses. 

Liquid sugar is a solution of fully dissolved sucrose, typically produced by dissolving white crystalline sugar in water. 

Its key functional benefits include highly efficient, time and energy saving blending into formulations, consistency across batches, and faster processing times. It removes the need to dissolve crystalline sugar during production. 

Liquid sugar is used across beverages, dairy, ice cream, bakery, snacks, cereals and breakfast bars, and pharmaceutical applications for its convenience, purity, mouthfeel and sweetness. It is used to prime and aid fermentation in brewing and is a bee feed ingredient.  

Glucose syrup is made from the hydrolysis of starch, usually from wheat when manufactured in Europe, using acids. The process results in syrups with varying levels of sweetness and dextrose equivalence (DE), which impacts viscosity and functional properties. 

Functionally, glucose syrup sweetens, enhances texture, reduces crystallisation, and as a humectant with water retaining properties, improves shelf life. Lower-DE syrups are less sweet but more viscous, while higher-DE syrups are sweeter and less thick. 

Glucose syrup is widely used in confectionery, ice cream, baked goods and bakery fillings, and sauces. It is also used in pharmaceuticals and medicines to inhibit crystallisation.  

Soft brown sugars are produced by blending white crystalline sugar with controlled quantities of molasses. They are classified into soft brown light sugar and dark soft brown sugar variants based on the molasses content. 

Light soft brown sugar has a mild caramel flavour, while dark soft brown sugar has a stronger, more robust taste. Both have a moist, fine texture that allows them to blend smoothly into sauces, batters and doughs. 

With its fine texture and volume, light soft brown sugar adds flavour colour and spread in biscuits, cakes and in sweet sauces. The higher molasses content of dark soft brown sugar adds flavour and colour to denser baked goods, like fruit cakes and gingerbreads, and is also used in sauces when a richer flavour is required.  

Muscovado sugars are less refined cane sugars blended with molasses. They retain a high molasses content, giving them a sticky, moist texture and rich flavour. Available as light cane muscovado sugar and dark cane muscovado sugar varieties. The light version has a mild toffee flavour, while the dark variety offers intense liquorice and burnt toffee notes. 

These sugars provide colour, moisture, and strong flavour notes. Their stickiness also affects how they perform in recipes, helping to create chewy textures.  

Light muscovado’s diverse functional properties enable it to be used in biscuits, caramels, sauces, preserves, dressings, meat glazes and ice creams. Dark muscovado is preferred for rich fruit cakes, chocolate products, traditional treacle toffee. Its fine texture and deep flavours also make dark muscovado a popular choice for savoury sauces, chutneys and pickles as a sweetener, colourant and to add texture and body.  

With its high molasses content and resistance to high temperatures, dark muscovado can also introduce process efficiencies, as a single ingredient where both sucrose and molasses are needed in a formulation.  

Demerara sugar is a cane sugar that undergoes minimal processing. It is sieved to produce coarse crystals with a golden colour and natural molasses coating. 

In addition to adding sweetness, its key functional property is its coarse texture, which offers crunch and slow dissolution. Demerara sugar also adds subtle molasses flavour and a decorative finish. 

Commonly used to increase the spread in biscuits, cookies, cakes, breakfast cereals and bars, demerara sugar is also used as a topping on baked goods, porridge, fruit and desserts. Its mellow sweetness is a perfect foil to coffee’s bitter notes, and the flavour profile complement dark spirit cocktails like the Mojito.  

Brewers’ sugars include a range of products such as brewing sugar, or brewers’ block when in solid form, and invert syrups used in brewing. These specialty sugar ingredients are specifically formulated to initiate, speed up and feed the fermentation processes and ensure consistency in brewing. 

Ragus’ brewing sugars are manufactured by inverting cane sugar into a refiner’s syrup, blending with cane molasses, then adding a dextrose seed crystal to crystallise the syrup into a solid block. 

Brewing sugar has specific functional properties, resulting in cleaner tasting beers with a crisper, drier finish. It is a nitrogen dilutant, making ales clearer, thinning the mouthfeel. Brewing sugar does not make the final brew sweet, so it is ideal to enhance flavour, texture and mouthfeel in drier styles without overpowering the other flavours. 

From moisture retention to flavour enhancement and fermentation control, the functional properties of sugar and syrup ingredients are critical to achieving the desired outcomes in both artisanal and industrial food and beverage products. 

Ragus manufactures a wide portfolio of sugar and syrup products, with the ability to blend and formulate bespoke solutions to meet specific customer needs and processes. To learn more, contact our Customer Services Team. For more sugar news and updates, continue browsing SUGARTALK and follow Ragus on LinkedIn.