History
The Holly Sugar company was founded in 1905 in Holly, Colorado. Its founder, Kenneth Schley, liked the name Holly because holly berries were traditional symbols of friendship and good cheer. By 1915, the expanding company built a factory in Sheridan, Wyoming, under the auspices of the Sheridan Sugar Company, of which Holly Sugar was the main shareholder. Over the next 15 years, under the l
eadership of A.E. Carlton, the company expanded aggressively, adding 10 new factories, including those in Worland and Torrington. Holly established an agricultural research station in Sheridan in 1936, which was known as Holly Hybrids. It sought to develop new beet seed varieties to increase sucrose content and yields. The Sheridan sugar factory, in operation since 1915, was dismantled in 1947, though the old buildings are still used for storage and processing of Holly Hybrids beet seed. In 2005, when Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative purchased Holly Sugar from Imperial Sugar Company (owners since 1988), the Holly Sugar name was relinquished and the name Holly Seed continued its Sheridan-based seed development and processing operations, unchanged by new ownership. Holly Seed
For more than 90 years, Holly Hybrids developed some of the best conventional sugarbeet seed the world has ever seen. Holly decided to change with it. Holly has been superior in providing growers with the right varieties for nearly four generations. So that's what we're doing. We're using our expertise for something new - teaching our growers the science of sugar. Holly Hybrids is no longer. We're Holly Seed. Today Holly Seed shares an alliance with SESVanderHave, a company born of the merger between Vanderhave (Dutch) and SES (Belgium), and together they have become the leading sources of varieties adapted in many sugarbeet growing areas around the world. Through all the changes of the past years, including improving technologies and tighter links with global markets, the key principles that still persist for Holly Seed are providing the best sugarbeet varieties to all sugarbeet production areas along with Service to a Science.
