The work presented here is concerned with the production of sugar from mixed juices that origin from both cane and beet. This is of interest because with the end of the regulation of the European sugar market in 2017 producers aim for higher utilization of their production sites. This can for example be achieved by co-processing of raw cane sugar and beet juice. Despite the abundant body of work concerning the colorants inclusion in either beet or cane sugar manufacturing practically no detailed information on this important parameter is available for mixed juices. The systematic study reported here reveals that colorants from different origin show a mutual suppression of their incorporation into the crystal. This is particularly surprising because these colorants are reported to follow specific incorporation mechanisms on different faces of the growing crystal. Further analysis reveals that the color contribution due to liquid inclusions, hence crystal imperfections, starts to increase only at high cane inclusion levels (80%), while the color effects of co-crystallization dominate and increase systematically with cane levels. Finally a model to forecast the color values of sugars crystallized from mixed juices is formulated. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.