A view of the famous C&H sign visible for miles at the C&H Crockett Refinery in Crockett, Calif., on March 2, 2022.

Driving across the Carquinez Bridge at night, the “C&H Pure Cane Sugar” sign’s LED and neon lights cast a gentle glow across the water. At 22 feet tall, it’s impossible to miss — a glimmering beacon above the tiny town of Crockett, also known as the Bay Area’s Sugar Town.

Little pink and white bags of C&H sugar have occupied Californian kitchen cabinets for more than a century (and their iconic jingle, “C&H, pure cane sugar from Hawaii,” occupied Californian minds throughout the 1970s and ’80s). Still, for many Bay Area residents, their most powerful connection with the California and Hawaiian Sugar Company is to that sign. 

But to Crockett, the company is much more than a song or a sign: It’s an integral part of its history. Once a picture-perfect company town, the relationship between Crockett and C&H has gotten much more complicated over the years, including a battle over a power plant and waterway pollution. 

An employee leaves after working a shift at the C&H refinery in Crockett, Calif., on March 2, 2022.

On a recent spring day, I headed to the East Bay and the picturesque town that just under 3,300 people call home. The steep streets are lined with old homes and local businesses, without a chain store in sight.  In the center of town, a neon sign with the outline of a woman sitting in a martini glass beckoned the thirsty to “Toot’s Tavern,” and a community board was plastered with posters about the latest town happenings.

But it was the industrial area at the north end of town, looking out over the water, that I’d come to see. That’s where the sugar refinery is housed.

Bags of packaged sugar are transported through the C&H refinery in Crockett, Calif., on March 2, 2022.

The minute I stepped into the C&H refinery, the sickeningly sweet smell of molasses assaulted my nostrils. A droplet of something sticky dripped on my shoulder. In the powdered sugar packing section, clouds of the pillowy substance hung in the air like saccharine apparitions. By the end of the tour, my shoes were so syrupy I had to hose them down. 

A lot has changed since C&H first opened the refinery in 1906, but the experience of sugar coating your every orifice has stayed the same, according to Barbara Denton, who worked summers at the refinery in the ’60s to pay her way through college at UC Berkeley. The longtime Crockett resident now volunteers at the Crockett Museum and is writing a book about the women who have worked at C&H.

“In the powder mill, or in the sugar cube area, there was sugar in the air, and when I breathed in I could taste the sugar dust,” she recalled to me. “I got sugar in my elbow crease, and then you’d sweat, and the sugar would stick … and it got in your hair. People wore hats, but it just settled in your hair.” 

In these historic photos, C&H Sugar employees pack cartons of powdered sugar, left, and filter sugar liquors, right, at the Crockett refinery.

Denton spent her summer packing sugar in cloth bags, sewing them shut and sweeping sugar off the floors, often in oppressive heat. But her lower-middle class Italian immigrant family, who also worked for C&H, could not afford to send her to college, so she kept the job. 

“It was a small price to pay for me, because I lived at home, saved all that money, and literally one summer paid for tuition, room and board, books, food, everything,” she said.

Denton describes herself as having grown up in the “golden age” of Crockett, back when C&H was intimately involved in every aspect of the community, and nearly every resident worked at the refinery. In its early days, Crockett was the picture of a company town. 

“I can’t tell you what a wonderful childhood we had, all brought on as a benefit of having C&H in the community,” Denton said. “C&H built a swimming pool, the men’s and women’s clubs, there were art shows, garden shows, and it was quite the place to be. C&H did the Christmas play, where every year they would give a gift to every child in town.”

The Californian and Hawaiian Sugar refining company building in Crockett, Calif., in 1914.

The refinery first opened in 1906, when a man named George Morrison Rolph transformed a beet sugar refinery into an operation for refining raw cane sugar from Hawaii. Rolph wanted to build a loyal workforce and inspire them to stick around, so he started investing heavily in the underdeveloped town. Improvements included building housing, a community center and even a park for his employees. 

“Crockett is an unincorporated county, so we don't really have any money as a town for amenities,” explained Erin Mullen Brosnan, another volunteer at the Crockett Museum. “But earlier, we didn't need it as much because C&H provided so many things … and they employed obviously a lot of people, generations of people.” 

At its peak, just before World War II, C&H employed 2,500 workers.

Dick Boyer, another volunteer at the Crockett Museum and a lifelong Crockett resident, also used to work at C&H. Like Denton, he worked summers at the refinery as a teenager, then returned later in life and ended up working there for 30 years. When he was growing up, he says, C&H was like a “father” to the town. 

Employees use machines to stitch together sacks for C&H Sugar on the fourth story of the Crockett Refinery on June 5, 1923.

“If there was a strike or layoff or some reason that the plant had to shut down, C&H talked to the storekeepers and asked them not to cut anybody out,” Boyer said. “If they needed credit or something like that, they’d give them credit. If [employees] didn't pay it, then C&H would."

He also recounted how C&H would help its employees purchase homes. When his parents could only come up with a down payment of 10% to buy a home, C&H co-signed the loan. Boyer still lives in that house today.

“I'm looking over the water, I sit on a quarter of an acre, and there's not anybody within spitting distance of me,” Boyer said. “And I own it.”

A view of the famous C&H sign visible for miles at the C&H refinery in Crockett, Calif., on March 2, 2022.

But that period of benevolence, when C&H showered the town with swimming pools and Christmas presents, couldn’t last forever. 

“In the mid to late ’60s, competition got great for C&H and they had to not only cut their workforce and automate, but they pulled back from all the benevolent gestures they had made towards the town,” explained Denton. “They tore down the swimming pool, and it was just one loss after another.”

Cotton bags were no longer sewed shut by hand, and automatic packing units replaced the work of many warehouse workers. Without all the perks, the shrinking number of employees began drifting to other towns; more than 100 families were displaced in the mid-1950s, when their homes were torn down to make way for Highway 80. In 1930, 90% of C&H workers lived in Crockett; by 1960, fewer than half did. 

In 1984, the town’s relationship to C&H soured further, when the company proposed building a natural gas power plant in Crockett. 

Steam rises from vents at the C&H refinery in Crockett, Calif., on March 2, 2022.

“It was, in my opinion, total disregard for the community,” Denton told me. The issue was less the plant itself, she said; the company planned to use technology called cogeneration, which the EPA considers a more efficient way to produce power than other methods. The biggest problem, according to Denton, was the proposed location — across the street from a residential neighborhood — which she called “abhorrent.” 

Crockett residents fought against it, reported the East Bay Express, slowing the construction by several years and forcing the company to build it in a different location. C&H also agreed to pay the town a settlement of $300,000 per year for the next 30 years, which now funds Crockett’s police and volunteer fire departments.

A decade later, new owners came to town, drastically changing C&H’s relationship with Crockett once again. In 1993, the cooperatively owned company sold to Alexander & Baldwin, transforming it into a corporation (Alexander eventually sold a controlling interest to CitiCorp Venture Capital). Since 2005, C&H has been owned by Florida-based American Sugar Refining the world’s largest cane sugar refiner, which owns at least seven sugar brands.

Plant manager Hitesh Modgil shows where raw sugar is stored in some of the nine huge raw sugar silos at the C&H refinery in Crockett, Calif., on March 2, 2022.

Despite the reference to Hawaii in its name, C&H no longer sources its sugar from Hawaii. The cane now comes from countries including Australia, the Philippines, Costa Rica, Panama and Nicaragua. While C&H has not been directly mentioned in investigations into sugar sourcing abroad, one of ASR Group’s brands, Domino Sugar, has been linked to a plantation holder in the Dominican Republic accused of worker exploitation and human rights abuses. 

“We're very careful about all our sourcing, to make sure that all of our raw sugar is appropriately sourced for our different kinds of goods,” ASR Group executive Peter O’Malley told me over Zoom when I asked him about ethical issues in sugar sourcing.

O’Malley also mentioned the company’s “corporate social responsibility” policy, which is a page online that links to ASR’s most recent Sustainability Report from 2018. The report explains how ASR keeps child labor and other exploitative practices out of its supply chain: Cane sugar producers must “agree to adhere to our Ethical Sourcing Policy” and “complete a self-assessment questionnaire” about their labor practices. There are third-party audits, too, although it is unclear how many of ASR's sugar suppliers have been audited since the report was released in 2018.

Raw sugar is stored in some of the nine huge raw sugar silos at the C&H refinery in Crockett, Calif., on March 2, 2022. The Crockett refinery receives about 800,000 tons of raw sugar a year and refines about 6 million pounds a day.

C&H has also dealt with a series of allegations of pollution. The California Regional Water Quality Control Board said C&H paid a total of $1,588,700 in fines over the past 20 years, $663,000 of which was set aside for environmental projects. In 2008, the company was charged with dumping “sugar, coliform bacteria, mercury and other chemicals into the Carquinez Strait,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Since 2002, C&H has been penalized by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board a total of 11 times, most recently in 2020.

I asked O’Malley about the environmental issues when I spoke to him over Zoom. He said he wasn’t familiar with the charges I was referencing; I later received a follow-up from a public relations correspondent via email.

“Following our acquisition of the refinery, we invested significantly in a number [of] projects to address issues that were present in the refinery before we purchased it,” read the emailed statement from ASR. “These included automated controls and monitoring systems to ensure we protect the quality of the water in the Carquinez Strait, as minimizing the impact of our operations on the environment is a strategic pillar of our company.”

A large shipping boat floats past the C&H refinery docks in Crockett, Calif., on March 2, 2022.

Today, C&H employs 488 people at the refinery. Only a dozen live in Crockett, but the population has seen new life during the pandemic, with an influx of people moving to the quiet town in search of more space.

“There's a strong community feeling,” said museum volunteer Mullen Brosnan. “People like that it's quirky, that it's cute and that it’s sort of isolated.”

Despite the waxing and waning of its relationship with C&H over the years, many residents still feel “tremendous loyalty,” to the sugar company, explained Denton.

“I think it’s resolved to more of a traditional relationship between a community and a large corporation,” she said. “Certainly everyone wants C&H to remain, but residents now are more savvy about what that relationship is or should look like. … People just have a healthy skepticism now.”

A recently redesigned C&H sugar box at the C&H refinery in Crockett, Calif., on March 2, 2022.

C&H is still involved in the community; they maintain a public park and the library, and lease the Crockett Museum to the county for $1 a year. But Boyer says it’s much more muted than what he remembers growing up.

“You don’t know all the bosses like you used to,” he told me. Company representatives still “have a big say in what goes on. But they aren't on all the committees. They always used to be on every committee in town.” 

A lot has changed in Crockett since Boyer first started working at C&H at age 16 in 1954, but one thing remains the same for him.

“I can be walking down the street, or even in my backyard, and tell you when a sugar load is coming in. It’s a heavy sweet molasses smell,” Boyer said. “Some people don’t like it, but I happen to enjoy it. I was born and raised on it.”

In this historical photo, people put together a display of C&H sugar boxes in the 1900s.

A view of the exterior of the C&H refinery in Crockett, Calif., on March 2, 2022.

The docks where raw sugar to transferred to the raw sugar silos at the C&H refinery in Crockett, Calif., on March 2, 2022. Twenty-five ships deliver about 750,000 tons of raw sugar to the refinery each year.

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Madeline Wells is a reporter for SFGATE covering food and drink in the Bay Area. She grew up in the Seattle area and received her B.A. in English and Media Studies from UC Berkeley. Prior to SFGATE, she was an associate editor at East Bay Express and freelance writer covering the Bay Area music scene. Email: madeline.wells@sfgate.com