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Why has left-handed sucrose been difficult and expensive to manufacture?

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Tall, dense stalks of sugarcane grow on both sides of a narrow path, with green leaves arching overhead and sunlight illuminating the plants. — sugar Lines of sugarcane before harvest.

The premise that "left-handed" sucrose is difficult and expensive to manufacture is accurate. While L-sugar (or "left-handed" sugar) is chemically identical to standard, "right-handed" sucrose in terms of its mirror-image molecular structure, its production remains prohibitively challenging and costly.1

Because L-sugar is a mirror image of the naturally occurring sugar that the human body is evolved to recognize and metabolize, the body does not process it. Consequently, it passes through the system unchanged, offering the potential for a noncaloric sweetener that retains the functional properties of regular sugar, such as texture and bulk. However, the complex synthetic processes required to create this specific molecular configuration have prevented it from becoming a commercially viable alternative to traditional sweeteners.1