During sugar production, contamination of the sugar by potentially toxic metals may occur. Therefore, it is necessary to develop methods to quantify these contaminants. Analytical method for monitoring of lead in sugar samples was developed with the use of homogeneous ternary system of solvents and UV-Vis spectrophotometry. Ternary system was optimized using multivariate experiments and the best condition was: 10% water, 80% ethanol and 10% methyl isobutyl ketone. As the complexing agent, monosodium 4-(2-pyridylazo) resorcinol used. Considering the Brazilian standard, the lead concentration should not exceed 2.00 mg kg -1 , thus, it's concluded that the values obtained were not within the norm for this metal.