On 16 May 1836 the Tienen municipality granted operating licenses to two would-be sugar makers. Pierre-Antoine Vanden Bossche opened his factory on Gilainstraat the same day. Van den Berghe opened his six months later, on 18 November, near the Begijnhof with 90 employees and the ambitious idea of growing his own beets as well as processing them. Early production ran at about ten sacks of raw sugar per day. By 1844 the operation had a four-atmosphere high-pressure steam engine of ten horsepower. In 1855 Van den Berghe sold to his neighbor Henri Vinckenbosch. Vinckenbosch had a nephew, also named Pierre-Louis, who ran a third factory in the old convent of Barberendal on Molenstraat. In 1862 the two nephews merged their works into a partnership called Vinckenbosch & Cie, and the consolidation that would build a sugar empire began.

Through the company's first decades the sugar question and the agricultural question were inseparable. A sugar beet plant draws hard on the earth, and rotating it intensively without depleting the field was nearly impossible until chemical fertilizers became cheap enough to use widely. So from 1838 until about 1875 the company kept twelve farms across roughly 1,200 hectares, producing enough beet to feed a factory that could process about thirty tonnes of sugar per day. In 1874 a new director, Victor Beauduin, made the critical decision: he gave up the farming. He turned cultivation over to independent growers and concentrated the company on industry. Production capacity climbed to 150 tonnes per day. Twelve years later Vinckenbosch bought the rival Blyckaerts works next door. On 17 September 1887 the public company La Raffinerie Tirlemontoise was founded.

In 1894 Paul Wittouck and his brother Frans bought the Tienen company. They already owned a sugar factory in Wanze, downriver on the Meuse, and the combination made them dominant in Belgian sugar. Between 1894 and 1913 the volume of sugar produced at Tienen rose from 7,000 tonnes to 62,000. The company began exporting and acquiring smaller competitors. By the early 1930s, sugar markets had been wrecked by overproduction and the Chadbourne Agreement of 1931 tried to coordinate the world output. The Tienen plant kept innovating through it all. Around 1933 it pioneered the continuous diffuser, a horizontal rotating machine invented by Julien Berge that extracted sugar from sliced beet in a steady flow rather than in batches. The diffuser type became known as the RT, after the company.

None of this growth would have been possible without trains. The line from Leuven to Tienen opened on 22 September 1837, less than a year after the first factories began operations. By 1842 the line stretched to Liege; by 1869, to Namur; by 1879, all across the Hesbaye. Coal from Wallonia could now reach Tienen cheaply enough to fire the boilers. Beet from a much wider catchment area could reach the factory. In 1886 a new station went up at Grimde just south of the main works, and the company built a French-style aerial ropeway, a teleferique, straight from the station to its Factory I. Locals called the swinging containers telefrikskes. They carried coal and beet until 1914. In 1899 two narrow-gauge railways were laid from the station to the beet-reception yards, and in 1905 a four-kilometer normal-gauge line was built between Factories I and II, navigating a ten-meter drop in elevation.

In 1989 the German conglomerate Sudzucker bought all the company's shares for about two billion guilders. The sugar business stayed within Sudzucker, while the non-sugar lines like bread, chocolate, and salads were spun off. The Tienen factory still operates, processing up to 12,500 tonnes of beets per day during the autumn campaign when farmers across Brabant and Hesbaye haul their crop to the gates. A sister plant at Wanze handles 16,500 tonnes per day and is supplied with juice by the Raperie de Longchamps, said to be the last operating raperie, a remote slicing station, in the world. The company's name still says refinery in French, a fossil from 1887 when the distinction between a sugar factory and a sugar refinery mattered enough to embed itself in a corporate name. The sugar still moves by road and rail. The fields all around still grow beets every year.