Beets are a biennial or annual root vegetable of the family Chenopodiaceae (goosefoot family). The beet (Beta vulgaris) has been cultivated since pre-Christian times. Among its numerous varieties are the red, or garden, beet, the sugar beet, Swiss chard, and several types of mangel-wurzel and other stock feeds. Both the roots and the foliage of the red beet are edible, as is the foliage of Swiss chard and similar varieties.

The sugar beet, cultivated commercially throughout the temperate zone, to which it is well adapted, provides about one third of the world's commercial sugar production; virtually all the rest comes from sugarcane.