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Photo courtesy of Canyon County Historical Society

This is what Nampa's first sugar-beet factory looked like in 1909. Amalgamated Sugar celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1998.

To many Treasure Valley residents, the Amalgamated Sugar Co. plant at Nampa means a big stink.

Inside the plant, it's a different story. It still smells, but so much is going on that you tend to overlook it.

Six hundred people work at the plant, most of them guiding sugar beets through the refining process or packaging sugar.

Amalgamated's brand is White Satin, but it's far from the only brand processed there. The Nampa plant processes and packages Safeway sugar, Fred Meyer sugar, IGA sugar, Parade sugar and other brands - 27 in all.

It makes sugar used by Hershey in its chocolate, Campbell's in its soups, Pillsbury in its pastries. Jolly Rancher candy also is made with sugar from the Amalgamated plant.

The big manufacturers used to get their sugar in 100-pound bags. Now, it's packaged in 2,000-pound bags the size of small closets.

It takes six hours for muddy beets rolling into the plant to become processed sugar waiting to be shipped. In the cooling room, the last step of the refining process, a cascade of sugar whitens walls and ceilings. Two million pounds of sugar, the plant's capacity, are processed every day of the year. It takes 25 million pounds of beets to make 2 million pounds of sugar. The smell, incidentally, is from bacteria acting on the beets.

Railroad cars are filled with processed sugar on a track inside the plant. A car containing 42 tons of sugar is filled every three and a half hours. That's in addition to a minimum of 47 truckloads of sugar that leave the plant each day.

Brown sugar is made by coating beet-sugar crystals with cane-sugar molasses. The coating is made at the Nampa plant and sent to the company's Nyssa plant, where it's added to the white sugar.

Powdered sugar is made by grinding regular sugar between rotating disks. Corn starch is injected to keep the particles of powdered sugar from sticking together.

The plant's boilers can be fired by natural gas. When the price of natural gas rose from 19 cents per British Thermal Unit to $2.40 in 15 months, the company switched to coal.

"We've always had the coal potential," Assistant Superintendent James Kusterer said. "And with the pollution-control equipment we've added, we're not putting anything into the atmosphere."

The plant makes three-fourths of the electrical power it needs by using steam from its boilers to turn turbines. They supply 9.3 megawatts of power per day. Even so, the plant's Idaho Power bill for January was $133,000.

"We have everything to be proud of and nothing to be ashamed of," Kusterer said. "We do a good job here. We're the best manufacturers of sugar in the U.S. and maybe the world."

High above the plant, at the top of Silo 12, is a peregrine falcon nest. Thirty-seven birds have hatched there in the last 12 years.

"We helped get them off the endangered-species list," Kusterer said.