After the 1830-1831 Belgian Revolution, the Dutch import of raw cane sugar from Java was redirected from Antwerp to ports in the northern Netherlands.

Only a few years after the Belgian independence, the Brussels haute finance gathered round the Société Générale took the initiative to found a beet sugar factory in rural Waterloo, a big village that lived from agriculture and forestry.

On 19 January 1836 the S.A. Raffinerie Nationale du Sucre indigène et exotique was founded.

Shareholders were:[1] The name Raffinerie Nationale du Sucre indigène et exotique was pretentious, but it fit size of the capital of 4,000,000 Belgian Francs, which was huge at the time.

Three large plots of ground totaling 700 hectares were brought in by the managing-directors Hamoir-De Reus and Moyard-Dugardin and the manager Lecocq.

On the others, at Sint-Genesius-Rode the farms Boesdaalhoeve and Sint-Gertrudishoeve were built to cultivate sugar beet in rotation with other crops.

The house for the management was the central Maison aux lions, which also held the offices.

From an auction announcement, we know that the factory had some modern manufacturing and refining equipment: steam engines, pumps, filters, evaporators, vacuum pans, defecating machines, etc.

It had not been chosen for there being suitable ground for sugar beet in the area, or that there were farmers willing to grow them.

Obviously, the only grounds to build at Waterloo was that the location was near the domicile of Count Ferdinand de Meeûs (1798-1861), president of Société Générale, who lived at the nearby Château d'Argenteuil.

In October 1850, a group of merchants from Antwerp bought the buildings of the Raffinerie Nationale.

This revivification of course came at some cost, and led to some deterioration, putting a practical limit on the amount of bone char that could be used.

[13] After the 1815 Battle of Waterloo tens of thousands of men and horses were hastily buried on the battlefield.

By 2022 it was already known that human and animal bones had been dug up at Waterloo and on other European battlefields and sent to the United Kingdom to be ground and used as fertilizer.

In 1907 the buildings were sold to a Mr. van Volsem, who tried to found a factory for natural rubber.

In 1989 the project developer Louis de Waele acquired the buildings to establish offices, retail shops and a hotel.