(With the loss of the large storage shed in the recent fire, raw sugar is now kept in the original three-story shed that stretches along much of the water side of the refinery.) After the crystals are spun in a centrifuge to remove liquid, they are ready for shipping.įrom the refinery’s dock, the tan-colored raw sugar travels by conveyor belt into the Weigh House and on to the Raw Sugar Shed where it awaits processing. The harvested sugar cane is crushed to remove the plant material and extract the juice, which is then boiled to a syrup that thickens and crystallizes. Raw sugar unloaded in Baltimore has been through its first processing step at a mill where the sugar cane is grown. The raw sugar comes from Florida and tropical and subtropical countries in this hemisphere and Africa. They usually arrive and depart very early in the morning and can spend a week or more to unload their cargo. The first step is in plain view for all to see: raw sugar being unloaded from ships by clamshell buckets suspended from two gantry cranes.Ībout 42 ships of different sizes dock at the refinery a year, each carrying, on average, 70 million pounds of raw cane sugar. Sugar moves through the refinery from the east side (nearest to Under Armour) to the west through distinct processing steps housed in different sections of the building. “The fundamental way that we refine sugar has not changed” in the nearly 100-year history of Domino Sugar production in Baltimore, says refinery manager Coricka White. It’s stunning sometimes what we’ve been able to pull off to keep everything in balance.” “We have to be very resilient and very nimble to respond. When something happens on one end of the refinery, it impacts all the other parts,” Coricka says. The structure exudes a calm and order that, Coricka says, is rarely part of her day-to-day managing of the refinery.
#Dominio sugar fire series
The monolithic architecture of the refinery, with its aged-brick façade and row upon row of windows, conceals a complex series of industrial processes at work inside. If you’ve bought a four-pound plastic tub of Domino granulated sugar, you have a product that is only made on Key Highway.
Consumers can find Baltimore products in stores on the peninsula, up to the Northeast states, south to the Carolinas, and west as far as Chicago. Most of this sweetness – about 70% – goes to bakers and other food producers. Granulated sugar is the refinery’s main output, but its dozens of sugar production lines also make superfine granulated, confectioners, light and dark brown, liquid, pharmaceutical grade, and several types of molasses. About a dozen of Domino’s 510 employees live on the peninsula.Īutomated production lines snake across several floors of the refinery, folding, filling, and sealing an array of packages with hardly a person in sight. Now owned by American Sugar Refining, Inc., a subsidiary of the ASR Group, the Baltimore refinery produces nearly triple what it did a century ago with one-third the workforce. When the refinery first opened, it had 1,500 employees and produced up to 2.2 million pounds a day. native, Coricka began her sugar-making career in Baltimore in 2003. “Some of the tools our operators use may be a little bit different, but the fundamental process is the same.” A D.C. “The fundamental way that we refine sugar has not changed,” says Coricka White, the new refinery manager promoted to that position in May. Inside, technology upgrades, automation, and a highly skilled workforce keep the plant humming, producing cane sugar products in much the same way it did when the refinery opened in 1922. While many industrial buildings of its generation have been abandoned or long since torn down, South Baltimore’s Domino Sugar refinery soldiers on, even overcoming a major fire this year that destroyed its raw sugar storage shed. The two other Domino refineries – one in Yonkers, N.Y., and one in Chalmette, La., downstream from New Orleans on the Mississippi River – are even older than Baltimore’s. This from a building that is nearly a century old and, from the outside, looks its age. Almost one-third of all Domino sugar produced. It could turn all of the homes on my street into a solid block of sugar in just nine days. The refinery’s average output could fill my two-story South Baltimore rowhouse with granulated sugar in less than four hours. But in the Domino warehouse, rows of one-ton sacks of granulated sugar, each the size of a squat refrigerator, stand on pallets. We typically experience sugar in small quantities: a four-pound bag at the store, a teaspoon packet at a restaurant. It’s hard to take in the staggering volume of sugar that comes out of Domino Sugar’s refinery on Key Highway East.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in our August-September 2021 newspaper edition, published on August 6.
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