Sugar Trivia
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109 free Sugar trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which sugar is a component of the antigens on red blood cells that determine your blood group?
Galactose
Galactose. In people with type B blood it is the sugar that caps a chain of sugars on the cell surface; in type A the cap is a close chemical cousin instead.
Q 02What is the browning of sugar under high heat, which gives crème brûlée its crisp top, called?
Caramelization
Caramelization. Heat alone breaks the sugar down into the complex compounds that give caramel its brown colour and rich flavour, whereas the Maillard reaction needs amino acids as well as sugar.
Q 03As of 2022, which country grew the largest share of the world's sugarcane, close to 40%?
Brazil
Brazil. Much of its cane never becomes sugar at all: it is fermented into ethanol, the fuel that the country's flex-fuel cars can run on.
Q 04Sugarcane is a giant member of which plant family?
The grasses
The grasses. Sugarcane is kin to maize, wheat and rice, but it stores its sugar in a jointed stalk that can stand up to seven metres tall.
Q 05Sugarcane's main species is thought to have been first domesticated on which large island between Asia and Australia?
New Guinea
New Guinea. Papuan farmers there bred the thick, sweet cane, and Austronesian seafarers later carried it west across the islands of Southeast Asia.
Q 06The word 'sugar' traces through Arabic and Persian to śarkarā, a word in which language?
Sanskrit
Sanskrit. Śarkarā first meant grit or gravel and only later ground sugar, and the word then travelled west with the trade through Persian, Arabic, medieval Latin and Old French.
Q 07Which hormone, made in the pancreas, lowers the level of sugar in the blood?
Insulin
Insulin. Frederick Banting and Charles Best extracted it from dogs in Toronto in 1921, and the treatment that followed turned a diabetes diagnosis from a death sentence into something people could live with.
Q 08Which explorer introduced sugarcane to the Caribbean, where it became the islands' great industry?
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus. He took the cane aboard in Spain's Canary Islands, already a sugar producer, in the 1490s, and within a generation Spanish settlers had mills of their own grinding.
Q 09Henry the Navigator had sugarcane brought from Sicily to which newly settled Atlantic island?
Madeira
Madeira. With Sicilian cane and know-how it became Europe's main sugar supplier by the late 15th century, and its plantations later gave way to the vineyards behind Madeira wine.
Q 10A polio vaccine given on a lump of sugar inspired a hit song in which Disney musical?
Mary Poppins
Mary Poppins. Songwriter Robert Sherman's young son told him the new oral vaccine had gone down on sugar at school, and 'A Spoonful of Sugar' followed.
Q 11Which spirit is distilled from sugarcane juice or the syrup left over from sugar-making?
Rum
Rum. It first turns up in records from Barbados around 1650 under the name 'kill-devil', and British sailors went on drawing a regular rum ration until 1970.
Q 12Cut off from Caribbean cane sugar by a British blockade, which ruler had his farmers plant beet instead?
Napoleon
Napoleon. He took up beet sugar in 1811, and though the industry stumbled after his fall it recovered: by 1880 the world was getting more sugar from beet than from cane.
Q 13Until the late 19th century, refined sugar was usually sold in what shape?
A cone
A cone. The 'sugarloaf' came out of its mould rock-hard, so households hacked at it with hammers and pliers-like sugar nips until granulated and cube sugar took over.
Q 21A burst tank sent a 35 mph wave of what through Boston's North End in January 1919?
Molasses
Molasses. More than two million gallons poured out, killing 21 people and injuring about 150, and Boston reportedly went on smelling of it for years.
Q 22The 1764 Sugar Act halved a widely dodged import duty but finally enforced it, feeding the anger behind which conflict?
The American Revolution
The American Revolution. Smugglers who had shrugged off the old duty could now be tried without a jury, in a vice-admiralty court in distant Nova Scotia.
Q 23In 1791 a best-selling pamphlet urged Britons to give up West Indian sugar in protest at what?
The slave trade
Q 14Sugarloaf Mountain overlooks which city's harbour?
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro. A cable car has climbed towards the peak since 1912, and in the 1979 Bond film Moonraker the villain Jaws attacks 007 on it in mid-air.
Q 15A sugar cube holds about as much as which kitchen measure?
A teaspoon
A teaspoon: each is about 4 grams. Jakub Rad patented the cube in 1843 after, the story goes, his wife hurt her hand breaking up a rock-hard sugarloaf and demanded something easier.
Q 16Which of these is the biggest source of added sugar in the American diet?
Sweetened drinks
Sweetened drinks. One can of cola holds up to 40 grams of sugar, which on its own overshoots the 25 grams a day the WHO would ideally have adults stop at.
Q 17The WHO's limit on 'free sugars' counts the sugar in which of these?
Fruit juice
Fruit juice. The 2015 guideline asks for free sugars under 10% of daily energy, and it exempts fresh fruit, vegetables and milk because no harm has been shown from the sugars in them.
Q 18Which is the only common sugar that cannot be extracted from plants?
Lactose
Lactose. It is the one common sugar of animal origin, found only in milk, and roughly two-thirds of the world's adults lose much of their ability to digest it after infancy.
Q 19Which natural sugar is the sweetest, sweeter gram for gram than table sugar?
Fructose
Fructose. It is why honey, which is rich in it, tastes sweeter than table sugar, and why food makers use enzymes to turn the glucose in corn syrup into it.
Q 20Naturally occurring glucose is also known by what other name?
Dextrose
Dextrose. The name comes from the Latin dexter, 'right', because a glucose solution twists polarized light to the right.
The slave trade. William Fox's Address argued that everyone who bought slave-grown sugar shared in the crime, and it ran through some 25 editions within a year.
Q 24The French colony of Saint-Domingue, the 18th century's richest sugar colony, is which country today?
Haiti
Haiti. The people enslaved on Saint-Domingue's plantations rose up in 1791, ended the sugar boom that had made it France's richest colony, and declared independence in 1804.
Q 25Which Caribbean island became the world's leading sugar producer in the 19th century?
Cuba
Cuba. After revolution wrecked Saint-Domingue's plantations, Cuban planters took the lead with the most mechanized mills in the world, while slavery lasted on the island until 1886.
Q 26American Sugar Refining, the forerunner of Domino, was a founding member of which stock index in 1896?
The Dow Jones
The Dow Jones. Known as the Sugar Trust, the company controlled about 98% of US sugar refining, yet in 1895 the Supreme Court ruled that the new Sherman Antitrust Act could not touch it.
Q 27Lyle's Golden Syrup tins illustrate the Bible riddle 'out of the strong came forth sweetness' with which animal?
A dead lion
A dead lion. Bees swarm the carcass, as in Samson's riddle in the Book of Judges, on a tin so little changed since 1885 that Guinness named it the world's oldest packaging in 2006.
Q 28Which London art gallery was founded with the fortune and paintings of a Victorian sugar refiner?
The Tate
The Tate. Henry Tate offered the nation his collection of British paintings in 1889 and gave £80,000 towards the Millbank gallery, which opened in 1897 and is now Tate Britain.
Q 29Constantin Fahlberg discovered saccharin after noticing a sweet taste on his hand while working at which university?
Johns Hopkins
Johns Hopkins. Fahlberg later patented saccharin without telling lab head Ira Remsen and claimed sole credit; Remsen, who wanted recognition rather than money, protested to his fellow chemists.
Q 30Saccharin is hundreds of times sweeter than sugar, but leaves which aftertaste?
Bitter
Bitter. The metallic edge is why the original Sweet'N Low mixed saccharin with cyclamate, each sweetener covering the other's off-taste.