The former sugar factory in Halfweg at dusk, photo SugarFactory

The beet campaign

The first sugar factory on this site opened in 1863, closed after a few years, and was followed by N.V. Suikerfabriek Holland, which later became part of CSM, the Centrale Suiker Maatschappij. For more than a century the factory was the beating heart of Halfweg. Every autumn, during the beet campaign, ships and carts arrived from the surrounding polders loaded with sugar beet, the chimneys ran day and night, and the whole village worked to the rhythm of the harvest. The oldest building on the site, the Gemeenlandshuis Zwanenburg from 1645, housed production kettles until 1950.

Scale eventually ended it. As sugar factories grew larger and fewer, the one in Halfweg closed in 1992. For a while it looked like one more piece of Dutch industry that would quietly disappear.

A show in the Middenfabriek, photo SugarFactory

From factory to SugarCity

In 2000 the site was renamed SugarCity and the transformation began. The old silos became offices. The big factory halls were turned into television studios, including the one that hosted The Voice of Holland. In 2007 the complex was recognised as industrial heritage and included in the European Route of Industrial Heritage. A new railway station was built right next to it, so today you step off the train from Amsterdam or Haarlem and walk straight into the factory gates. Schiphol is fifteen minutes by car.

The venue now operates under the name SugarFactory, with four event spaces and a total of 10,000 square metres. The Middenfabriek alone is 3,525 square metres, with a renewed roof, high ceilings and a car lift. The Pulppersloods adds another 1,000 square metres and the Binnenstraat, the covered inner street, 900. You can use them separately or open everything up into one enormous event.

JDI Day 2023, the Nike day for which SugarCity hosted a thousand employees

A thousand Nike employees

That is what we did for Nike’s Special Sports Day, a large-scale internal event celebrating inclusive sports, which we co-produced at SugarCity for a thousand Nike employees. It sat alongside our work with Nike on three editions of JDI Day, where the Paralympic Sports Square became an arena of activations and pro-athlete clinics. The Special Sports Day took that idea and scaled it up, inside a building big enough to hold a day of this size under one roof.

A venue of this size changes the job. Flow becomes everything: where a thousand people arrive, eat, move between activities and gather at the end of the day. The building helps, because its halls and covered inner street already have a logic of their own.

The Middenfabriek set up for a party, photo SugarFactory

Insider notes

SugarCity is the answer when the guest list runs into the hundreds and the programme needs multiple zones at once: sports days, company festivals, product launches that want a raw industrial backdrop. The train station next door solves the biggest logistical headache of any large event. Plan the Binnenstraat as your spine, use the Middenfabriek for the main moment, and let the history do the talking in your invitation.