- 1830: Jean-Baptiste Auguste Desprez starts producing and trading sugar beet seeds and founds the company Desprez in Wattines
- 1856: for the first time, Florimond Desprez, Jean-Baptiste’s son, uses chemical sugar analysis and genealogical selection to improve the sugar beet
- 1875: Wattines becomes an experimental government-owned station, as decreed by the French Ministry of Agriculture
- 1945: breeding work starts for barley
- 1946: Cappelle bread wheat variety is registered
- 1971: breeding work starts for industrial chicory
- 1981: breeding work starts for triticale
- 1987: first subsidiary is created outside of France: Deltasem in Morocco; Soissons soft wheat variety is registered
- 1988: breeding work starts for durum wheat
- 2002: new industrial chicory and sugar beet laboratory is built in Cappelle-en-Pévèle and construction of the Houville-la-Branche breeding station
- 2005: acquisition of the company SESVanderHave is completed
- 2009:SW Winter Oilseed AB is created a company specialising in breeding, producing and marketing varieties of winter oilseed rape, in partnership with SW Seed AB (Sweden) and Elsoms (GB)
- 2010: Florimond Desprez buys a stake in the German breeder Saatzucht Streng-Engelen; a new multi-species industrial site is built in Cappelle-en-Pévèle
- 2012: a company is created in Hungary with Axéréal: Isterra; a subsidiary is set up in Argentina
- 2013: a company is set up in Argentina with Bioceres: Trigall Genetics
- 2014: the company Germicopa is acquired
- 2016: Florimond Desprez acquired 49% of the shares in Danespo
- 2017: the company SPB is acquired
- 2018: the company Endotar is acquired
