This study showed the effect of electric field condition (field strength and capacity of capacitors) and pulse number on disintegration of sugar beet cells. Optimization of field strength, capacity of condenser and pulse number are very important to obtain high value of cell disintegration index (di) with lower energy consumption. Although thermal treatment at high temperature up to 80 ◦C for 10min completely disintegrated the sugar beet cells, but the energy consumption was nearly 20 times higher than PEF treatment. In addition,the PEF treatment for cell disintegration at remarkably shorter time (≤1min) was compared to conventional thermal processing (≥10min). Furthermore this study showed that the leaching of sugar and ions from sugar beet cells were accelerated after PEF treatment and there is a direct relationship between cell disintegration index (di) and leaching of cell content. However, release of ions and sugar from disintegrated cells in hot water (75 ◦C) was slightly faster than in PEF treated sample at room temperature. Using PEF treatment is also possible to extract the cell contents of sugar beet at moderate temperature with little or no thermal degradation of high molecular substances. More research is necessary to evaluate the quality and purity of extracted juice after PEF treatment compared to thermally extracted juice.