Our history

  • 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

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