The internet is full of fabulous facts about everything from current events to the history basket weaving. As we research for our daily content on food trucks, food carts and street food, we stumble upon some items of knowledge that we just did not know.

We have decided when these fun facts pop up, that we would share them with our readers in our section titled “Did You Know?”

For today’s Did You Know we will look at molasses fun facts:

Molasses Fun Facts: Molasses is a viscous by-product of the refining of sugarcane or sugar beets into sugar.

• During the sugar refining process, molasses is separated from sugar crystals after each of three boiling processes that sugar cane goes through.
• The 3rd and final separation is called blackstrap molasses, and is used mostly as an ingredient in cattle feed.
• February 8th is National Molasses Bar Day.
• Using sugar beets to produce sugar was not developed until the mid-1700s when a German chemist Andreas Marggraf discovered the presence of sugar in the vegetable.
• The beet sugar industry struggled in the United States until the end of the nineteenth century when a California factory finally turned a profit.
• The first major historical event involving molasses was the Molasses Act of 1733, which imposed duties on all sugar and molasses brought into North American colonies from non-British possessions.
• On January 15, 1919, a large 50 foot high storage tank in Boston burst and sent a tidal wave of over 2 million gallons of molasses traveling at over 30 miles per hour.
• Molasses figured prominently in the infamous slave trade triangles of the late seventeenth century.

Molasses Fun Facts We Missed

Feel free to let us know about the molasses fun facts we missed. If we can verify that the facts is just that, a fact, we will give the reader credit in the article.

Reference: Wikipedia article on Molasses.

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