Sugar Mill Consolidation in Mauritius: How Three Powerhouses Replaced 300 Mills
Consolidation Was the Real Innovation The most important fact about sugar mills in Mauritius is not that the island went from 296 mills to 3. It is that the industry stopped duplicating the same expensive machinery at plantation scale and started treating sugarcane as an island-wide industrial system. Three plants — Omnicane, Alteo, and Terra — now handle roughly 3 million tonnes of cane supplied by about 11,000 planters. That is not a story of collapse. It is a story of redesign. The old model spread boilers, crushers, maintenance crews, laboratories, and transport bottlenecks across hundreds of small sites. The modern model concentrates those costs into a few plants that are large enough to justify automation, cogeneration, ethanol recovery, and tighter quality control. In practice, consolidation did not shrink the industry. It made the industry economically readable again. ...