its one of the biggest employers (with around 850 staff) and a big part of the community.
He says: “I enjoy
working here. I love seeing our products on shop shelves and am always trying to
keep an eye on

the latest sugar and sweetener products coming out. We have a new crane on the jetty, better ships coming in and the river is keeping busy too – with bigger cruise ships and other craft visiting. We’ll keep using the river,
I think doing so keeps 10,000 trucks off the roads every year.

“And we send one ship a month to Norway, the only place we export directly to. One interesting fact is that our biggest demand for golden syrup, outside of the UK is Yemen.”
He adds: “The Thames refinery, like
the river it’s on, has a very important heritage and history.”

Meanwhile, a mile away, Lyle’s Golden Syrup and associated goods is similarly packed up and shipped out (more than a million tins of syrup every month). The company has 285 separate products leaving Silvertown and its neighbouring site.

As well as its sugar duties,
Tate and Lyle Sugars regularly welcome groups of schoolkids through its gates to explain the refining process in a series.
This is a role it takes very seriously according to Joe, especially as

How it’s processed “Granulated white sugar is our most popular product without a doubt”, says Joe. We do 1kg packs that everyone’s familiar with, and then there are bigger measurements, one-tonne bags for instance, which are bought in bulk by food manufacturing customers and bakeries, that sort of thing.
Following the long and meticulous chemical process of producing white sugar and sugar cane’s many variants, 1kg packs of
sugar are bagged at the refinery
at an astonishing rate.

Joe says: “Our 1kg packing machines can pack 125 bags per minute, that’s around 7.5 tonnes per hour. And the one-tonne packing line can get through 25 tonnes every hour.”

The lightning-fast machines safely seal and stamp the goods which are then trucked to a multitude of UK locations. The stamp of every pack of sugar includes the letter ‘T’, meaning Thames.