History of fructose

Fructose was first extracted from sugar cane more than a century ago, and it’s found in varying amounts in such fruits, as apples, grapes oranges, honey, cane sugar and berries.

The sweetness of cane sugar approximates that of wild honey. Honey is mentioned in very ancient documents. It was antiquity’s only form of sugar. Oriental peoples as w ell as early Teutonic tribesmen found honey indispensable to their way of living as both a nutrient and an appetizer, as the writings of Plutarch and Aristotle attest.

It wasn’t until 1744 that a German chemist found that the sugar isolated from sugar beets was identical to the sugar from sugar cane.

During the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, chemists isolated and characterized sucrose, glucose, fructose, starch, cellulose, gum arabic, and many other carbohydrate.

 The name derived from the observation by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis Jacques Thenard in 1810-1811 that the formula of all of the members of these class of organic compounds could be reduced to the generic formula Cn(H2O)n.

In the 1970s, the food processing industry made a discovery: high fructose corn syrup could save them lot do money.

The first hydrolysis plant was built in America in 1967, the Clinton Corn Processing Co., producing syrups of 42% fructose practically as sweet as sucrose.
History of fructose