TRADE AND MARKETING wards packaged potatoes How did you end up in America? ‘During my business administration studies, I studied in various European countries. This quickly made me very enthusiastic about foreign countries. After a traineeship in 1979 at the American company Chase Bag, a supplier of woven paper bags, I entered the service of Dutch NNZ Flexoplast in 1982. In 1984, I left again for America in order to work as a representative for Chase Bag. After having carefully mapped out the market, in 1986 NNZ asked me to set up an establishment in America. In order to investigate the possibilities for such a company, I visited all the potato and onion growers from Buffalo to New York in a week’s time. This immediately resulted in the sale of 2 million bags, which gave NNZ America a strong foothold. Via Knoxville Tennessee, we finally established our company in Atlanta. The most important reason for establishing the company there is that Atlanta has the biggest airport of America and that you can efficiently travel from there both locally and internationally.’ Did the company continue to be as successful as in that first week? ‘As a foreigner it wasn’t always easy to do business with the Americans. Buyers often asked themselves: what’s that Dutchman doing here? In the early 80s, the people here still often preferred to buy home-grown products. For example, you only saw American cars parked in the parking lots of the companies here. But we were already selling bags that were imported from China. Some found that difficult to accept but it’s totally different nowadays. Foreign brands are more easily accepted and are easier to introduce. You can see that in our turnover. We had a 10 million euro turnover in America in 2014. As the market is still growing every year, we think that we could increase our turnover further in the coming years.” Have you only been active in America during that time? ‘No, I returned to the Netherlands in 1992 when my father retired. Together with my brother Len ( the present general manager of the NNZ group, Ed.) we carried on the business. Because we considered ourselves a bit too young to lead the entire company completely, Rony Kelz came to support our team as general manager for ten years. In those days, we expanded considerably taking over potato sector. We’ve always been a big player in the American market, especially in the period of the woven plastic bags (Raschel bags). This market has partly been taken over by bags that consist of half net and half polyethylene material. Because this type of bag has been patented, we couldn’t supply them ourselves for a long time. However, we’ve had the rights to an American design on our TwinBag packaging since last year and are growing rapidly again ‘Unfortunately, the table potato market in North America is a commodity market.’ various companies in Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark and Lithuania. But America kept drawing me so that I returned in 2001.’ Are there big differences between America and Europe? ‘In Europe, the packaging of potatoes is our core business. In seed potatoes and in Europe as a whole you see a trend from jute bags to big bags. American small packaging firms currently still use the wicket bag a lot for the consumer market. This is a bag that hangs with two pins under a weighing machine. By opening the bag with vacuum suckers, the product drops into the bag and is subsequently sealed. A completely different system from the European foil tube machines that companies like Jasa and Sorma supply. Small packaging firms achieve a much higher capacity with this type of machine. A shift to such machines is important, because labour is getting increasingly difficult to find, also in America, and mechanisation is playing an increasingly important role as far as guaranteed continuity is concerned. If you look at the distribution in the market, we now have a large market share in onions, and we’re also expanding in the in this specific market. This expansion comes at the right moment, because the American supermarkets are increasingly changing over from unpackaged to packaged potatoes. Also, consumer demands regarding food safety are increasing rapidly. This opens up opportunities for us. Unfortunately, the table potato market in North America is a commodity market, where the price is usually the leading factor. So a major part of the packaging market uses cheap polyethylene, with the packagers often doing business directly with the manufacturers concerned. Fortunately, there’s also a trend towards the quality packaging that we sell. This certainly applies to the smaller packaging that’s currently more in demand. Our TwinBag fits in very well with that trend. This type of packaging lets the potato breathe much better, which means the quality of the tubers is maintained for longer, both during transport and on the shelf. A longer storage life is important because it sometimes takes at least a fortnight for the potatoes to travel from the grower to the consumer’s pot. It’s interesting that we sold this type of packaging mainly in the summer last year, when the quality was more under pressure. Contrary to the bags of Potato World 2015 • number 4 5 Pagina 4

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