PW-ACTUA MEO has been loading potatoes for 75 years ‘Look around you. Isn’t it great that we’re together with so many people? Who’d have thought that a company established during the Second World war would still be very much alive 75 years later’, is how John de Boer, the current Director of MEO, welcomed the five hundred or so business contacts of the stevedoring firm at its party in honour of this jubilee. ‘What hasn’t changed in 75 years is that it’s the people that make a company. This applies both to the people that work for MEO and the people of the companies in the TMA group we work closely together with’, De Boer emphasises. MEO first saw the light of day under the name Transportbond Medemblik on 18 June 1941. ‘After the crisis of the thirties came the period in which agricultural trading got going again. What you needed then was workers you could rely on and who could make themselves useful. The company started its activities with making products from the horticultural auction in WestFriesland ready for shipping. They were real pioneers. Fantastic, what the MEO people have accomplished in 75 years. Of course, times have changed. In the beginning, the purchase of a forklift truck was deliberated on for days. Nowadays, we talk about investments of millions of euros for container cranes, lorries and storage halls. What hasn’t changed, though, is that for 75 years we’ve been gearing to the latest market developments. You can see that in our history. From carrying out ‘It´s not our storage halls or cranes that are our biggest capital, but our staff’, John de Boer tells the five hundred business contacts at the 75th jubilee. heavy, physical work, lugging around 65 kg bags of cocoa or 50 kg bags of seed potatoes, today almost everything is done by cranes or forklift trucks. This requires a completely different logistical approach. And the introduction of containers for the export of potatoes also requires a very different approach’, De Boer explained. Our publicity film which connects the company´s past, present and future, shows that automation will definitely continue in the future. Maybe robots will take over the operations fully. Following on from this theme, a half-man/halfrobot opened the evening with the topic of how the past will keep its special place and the future is what we must now look to. In order to continue to gear to developments, MEO became part of the TMA Group in 2011. In this Group, MEO works together with ACS Logistics, and Thor Shipping & Transport. ‘By forming this Group, we’re able to offer our customers every aspect of loading on land and sea, and storage and transshipment. It’s important that we continue to follow all the developments together. The TMA Group forms a strong basis in this, but our success lies mostly in the collaboration between our staff and our customers. It´s not our storage halls or cranes that are our biggest capital, but our staff. It’s fantastic that we’ve been able to solve logistical problems for all those years. And that’s absolutely what we want to continue to do in the coming 75 years’, De Boer adds enthusiastically. ● Half-man/half-robot opened the evening with the topic of how the past will keep its special place and the future is what we must now look to. 12 Potato World 2016 • number 4 Pagina 11
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