Watch: This Is How Jaggery Is Mass-Produced In India

Jaggery is a common food item in most Indian kitchens. People often use it as an alternative to sugar. A significant amount of jaggery in India is made using the traditional process that involves shifting the sugarcane juice from one container to another as it is boiled and reduced into a solid form. Recently, a popular food blogging account on Instagram shared a video that documented how jaggery is mass-produced at a small-scale factory. The process showed that despite improvised modern set-up the process still involved major human intervention as it was not fully automated yet. In the comments, many people were surprised by the jaggery-making process.

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The video captured how sugarcanes are first pressed in a machine for juice extraction. This juice passes into a massive bowl that is put on a slow boil. The impurities from the juice are sieved out. At this point, the sugarcane juice appears to be black. This is probably because when sugarcane juice is boiled, it turns into dark brown or black. In the next frame, the sugarcane juice is transferred to another bowl where it is again simmered.

By this time the mix is golden in colour. A man puts a bunch of what appears to be food coloring in the mix which makes the jaggery change its color to deep orange. The sugar cane juice reduction is shifted to a shallow flat frame where it is set to cool down. Once the mix is semi-solid, a man cuts it into small rectangles and makes a pancake-like ball out of it. These jaggery balls are left for drying and finally packed.

This clip has over one lakh likes since it was posted on December 19, 2023. An Instagram user commented, “I thought they were making bricks.”

Praising the nutritional content of the locally made jaggery another person wrote, “After eating jaggery of this quality, my grandfather is 93 years old and still does not wear spectacles and even today he walks 1 mile in field..”

People also praised the jaggery makers for their hard work. An Instagram user wrote, “Great respect for these people who work so hard for such little pay.” Another person wrote, “These ppl are really doing efforts they just need to make things cleaner and Safe.”