It is called the Sugar Bowl because the game was created in New Orleans at a time when sugar was the state’s signature industry, and the original stadium sat on land where sugar was once crystallized.

Name origin

  • The New Year’s college football game was proposed in the late 1920s by New Orleans newspaper figures who wanted a festival game like the Rose Bowl and Orange Bowl.
  • Sports editor Fred Digby began calling the envisioned event the “Sugar Bowl” to highlight Louisiana’s identity as the leading sugar‑producing state in the United States at the time.

Sugar connection to New Orleans

  • In the 1790s, Étienne de Boré first successfully crystallized cane juice into granulated sugar in the New Orleans area, on land that later included Tulane University and Tulane Stadium.
  • Because of that history, Tulane Stadium—where the first Sugar Bowl was played in 1935—was built on former sugar plantation land, further reinforcing the sugar theme in the game’s name.

The first Sugar Bowl game

  • The Sugar Bowl was officially established in the mid‑1930s, with the inaugural game played on January 1, 1935, at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans.
  • The game quickly became one of college football’s major New Year’s bowl games, with its name serving as a nod to both the local sugar industry and the city’s historic role in sugar production.

TL;DR: It is called the Sugar Bowl because New Orleans and Louisiana were historically defined by sugar production, and the original game site stood on land tied to early U.S. sugar‑crystallization and former sugar plantations.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.