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60 free Sugar trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Sugar built empires, started wars of taxation and rewired the human diet, and it makes for far better trivia than its plain white crystals suggest. This quiz runs from the science — what sucrose is actually made of, why fructose is the sweetest natural sugar, how many times sweeter than sugar saccharin is — through the history of cane in India, Madeira and the Caribbean, the German chemists who pulled sugar out of a beet, and the 1919 Boston tank burst that sent a wave of molasses through the North End at 35 miles an hour. It also wanders wherever the word does: the Archies' bubblegum hit, the two boxers called Sugar Ray, the sugarloaf that named a Rio mountain, the Sugar Bowl, the Sugar Plum Fairy and the dentist who co-invented cotton candy. Easy questions cover which two plants supply the world's sugar and what a sugar cube weighs; expert ones ask which Prussian village hosted the first beet-sugar factory and who told Theodore Roosevelt that saccharin was harmful. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on sugar, sucrose, sugarcane, the history of sugar and the people and products involved, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
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Q 01Which simple sugar is a component of the antigens on red blood cells that determine your blood group?
Galactose
It rarely occurs free in nature and is mostly met bound to glucose in milk sugar; on its own it is less sweet than glucose.
Q 02Which two crops supply virtually all of the world's commercially refined sugar?
Cane and beet
Cane accounts for about 79% of global sugar output; the two crops together weighed in at roughly two billion tonnes in 2016.
Q 03Which country produces the largest share of the world's sugarcane, around 38-40% of the total?
Brazil
Sugarcane is the world's largest crop by tonnage, and much of the Brazilian harvest ends up as ethanol fuel rather than sugar.
Q 04Sugarcane is a giant member of which plant family?
The grasses
It belongs to Poaceae alongside maize, wheat and rice, with jointed stalks up to 7 metres tall that store sucrose in their internodes.
Q 05The main species of sugarcane, Saccharum officinarum, was first domesticated on which large island?
New Guinea
Papuans began breeding it from wild Saccharum robustum around 4000 BC, and Austronesian voyagers later carried it across the Pacific as a canoe plant.
Q 06The word 'sugar' traces through Arabic and Persian to śarkarā, a word in which language?
Sanskrit
The word originally meant 'grit, gravel', and the Sanskrit khanda for a sugar crystal is the root of the English word candy.
Q 07Around AD 350, people in which region first turned cane juice into granulated sugar crystals?
India
Chinese envoys were sent there in 647 to learn the refining technology, and travelling Buddhist monks carried the method east.
Q 08Which explorer carried sugarcane seedlings to the New World on his second voyage in 1493?
Christopher Columbus
He planted them on Hispaniola, where the first sugar harvest came in 1501, and mills spread across the Caribbean within a few decades.
Q 09Henry the Navigator brought cane in 1425 to which Atlantic island, producing 3 million lb of sugar a year by 1492?
Madeira
The Canaries and this island were the stepping stones that carried the sugar industry from the Mediterranean toward the Americas.
Q 10Which German chemist announced in 1747 that sugar could be extracted from beets?
Andreas Marggraf
His student Franz Karl Achard turned the discovery into an industrial process and made the first beet sugar in 1783 in Kaulsdorf.
Q 11The world's first beet-sugar factory opened in 1801 in Cunern, a village in which then-Prussian region?
Silesia
Backed by King Frederick William III, the plant never turned a profit and was destroyed in the wars against France that followed.
Q 12Which ruler banned sugar imports in 1813 and ordered 32,000 hectares planted with beetroot?
Napoleon
A French beet-sugar industry grew out of the decree, and by 1899 beets supplied roughly two-thirds of the world's sugar.
Q 13Until the late 19th century, refined sugar was usually sold in what shape?
A cone
Households used pliers-like 'sugar nips' to break pieces off the hard sugarloaf, which is why the sugar cube was such a relief when it arrived.
Q 21A burst tank sent a 35 mph wave of what through Boston's North End in January 1919?
Molasses
The 2.3-million-gallon tank killed 21 people and injured 150, and residents insisted the neighbourhood smelled sweet on hot summer days for decades afterwards.
Q 22The 1764 Sugar Act cut in half the duty imposed by which earlier, widely evaded, colonial law?
The Molasses Act
The 1733 law's sixpence-a-gallon tax was never effectively collected; halving it and actually enforcing it helped feed the anger that became the American Revolution.
Q 23From the 1740s to the 1820s, sugar held what distinction in Britain's economy?
Its most valuable import
Q 14Sugarloaf Mountain, named for its resemblance to a block of refined sugar, overlooks which city's harbour?
Rio de Janeiro
The 396-metre granite peak got its name from 16th-century Portuguese sugar traders, who shipped sugar in conical clay moulds.
Q 15A standard sugar cube weighs roughly how much?
4 grams
That is about a teaspoon, which is why cubes are the go-to visual for showing how much sugar a soft drink contains.
Q 16Globally, the average person eats roughly how much sugar per year?
24 kg
North and South Americans reach up to 50 kg a head, while Africans average under 20 kg.
Q 17In 2015 the WHO recommended keeping free sugars below what share of total energy intake?
10%
It also encouraged a further cut to below 5%, citing links between added sugar and obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
Q 18Which is the only common sugar that cannot be extracted from plants?
Lactose
It occurs only in milk, including human breast milk, and some adults stop producing the lactase enzyme needed to digest it.
Q 19Which naturally occurring sugar is the sweetest, rated about 1.7 times as sweet as sucrose?
Fructose
Its sweetness is why corn syrup is enzymatically converted to high-fructose corn syrup, and why fruit and honey taste so sweet.
Q 20Naturally occurring glucose, D-glucose, is also known by what other name?
Dextrose
It is sometimes called grape sugar because drying grape juice yields crystals of it, and it is the sugar carried in the bloodstream.
By 1750 sugar had overtaken grain as the most valuable commodity in European trade, making up a fifth of all European imports.
Q 24In the mid-1740s which French colony became the world's largest sugar producer?
Saint-Domingue
Better irrigation, water power and machinery made the French islands the most profitable of the 18th century, until revolution and abolition upended the trade.
Q 25Which largely flat Caribbean island became the region's richest sugar producer in the 19th century?
Cuba
Nearly three-quarters of its land is rolling plain, and its planters adopted steam engines and vacuum pans while keeping slavery longer than most neighbours.
Q 26American Sugar Refining, forerunner of Domino, was one of the original 12 companies in which 1896 stock index?
The Dow Jones
The Havemeyer family's Brooklyn refinery was the largest in the United States after being rebuilt following an 1882 fire.
Q 27Which animal features on the tin of Lyle's Golden Syrup, the world's oldest unchanged brand packaging?
A dead lion
The 1888 logo shows the biblical Samson story, with bees swarming the carcass and the motto 'out of the strong came forth sweetness'.
Q 28What is true of the relationship between rival sugar refiners Henry Tate and Abram Lyle?
They never met
Their refineries sat just 1.5 miles apart on the Thames, and at the merger the combined firm refined about half of Britain's sugar.
Q 29At which university did Constantin Fahlberg discover saccharin in 1879 after noticing a sweet taste on his hand?
Johns Hopkins
Lab head Ira Remsen fumed as Fahlberg patented and profited from the discovery, calling him 'a scoundrel'.
Q 30Saccharin is roughly how many times sweeter than sucrose?
500
It has a bitter, metallic aftertaste at high doses, so it is often blended with cyclamate or aspartame to mask it.