Quality, Storage and Processing of Plant Products (QSP) is a university course taught at the Faculty of Tropical AgriScience in the first block of the winter semester. The lectures cover plant commodities that are processed into food and food industry ingredients such as sugar, flour, vegetable oil, and beverages (hot non-alcoholic and alcoholic fermented and distilled), with emphasis on harvesting, processing, storage and quality parameters of plant products. During one of the excursions, students learned about the production of sugar from sugar beet:
The Sugar Factory in Dobrovice is the largest, oldest and most modern plant of its kind in the Czech Republic. It was founded in 1831 and has operated every season since then, which is unique in Europe. The Dobrovice facility operates in line with the principles of circular economy, processing sugar beet without waste. The main products are table sugar (crystalline sucrose), alcohols, feed, fertiliser, soil, water and energy. Students in the QSP course went through the entire sugar production process from raw material intake, laboratory inspection, and sugar extraction to processing the sweet juice into crystalline sucrose.
