The Sugar Museum was a museum that operated from 1904 until 2012 in Berlin with exhibits dedicated to the history and technology of sugar. At its closure as an independent museum in 2012, it was the oldest such museum in the world, and was housed in the Institut für Lebensmitteltechnologie (Institute of Food Technology) in Wedding, Mitte. It reopened in the form of a modernized exhibit at the German Museum of Technology in Kreuzberg in November 2015. History Berlin played an important role in the history of sugar production. Andreas Sigismund Marggraf discovered beet sugar there in 1747, and his student Franz Carl Achard was the first to produce it, beginning in 1783, in Kaulsdorf, which became part of Greater Berlin in 1920. In 1799 he presented the product to King Frederick William III of Prussia, who sponsored him in establishing in 1801 the first beet sugar production facility in the world in Cunern, in Silesia (now Konary, Wołów County, Poland). In 1867 a sugar research laboratory was established in Berlin under Carl Scheibler. On 8 May 1904, the Institute for Sugar Industry which had developed out of this opened, and the Sugar Museum simultaneously opened on the upper floor of the building, as the first such institution in the world. Edmund Oskar von Lippmann is largely credited for the opening of the museum. In 1945, the museum became the property of Berlin, and in 1978 of the Technical University of Berlin. In 1988, it became a state museum of the former GDR and, after a year of renovations, reopened on 22 September 1989. Since 1 November 1995, it has been a branch museum of the German Museum of Technology. The museum remained in its original building in the sugar industry neighbourhood of Wedding until November 2012. The Sugar Museum had 450 square metres of floor space devoted to the history and technology of sugar. About 20,000 people visited it every year. Permanent exhibition At the independent museum, exhibits were labelled in German only, although an English-language pamphlet describing them was also available. Lonely Planet called the Sugar Museum "quirky... a surprisingly entertaining exhibit where you’ll learn all about the origin of sugar and its chemistry." The long-time director of the Sugar Museum, Hubert Olbrich, said in 1989 that its purpose was "To show and thus bring before the public the history and the development of sugar into a staple