e TRADE AND MARKET I NG evostar Potato T his year marks the 25th anniversary since Jaap Kodde (66) started his Flevostar business. ‘What the consumer wants to eat, we’ll have to deliver’, was and is the view that Kodde has always felt very strongly about. ‘You shouldn’t package potatoes the Dutch consumer doesn’t appreciate, and that still happens all the time. I’m now talking about varieties that are not very tasty. The result is that negotiations with buyers are often only about the price and often not enough about the taste. We focus specifically on taste!’ he explains. With an annual turnover of approx. 20,000 tons of potatoes, the business is firmly grounded in the current potato market. This year, the business will go in a different direction. ‘Together with William Verhage, the former director of Select Potato, I established the Flevostar Potato trading company’. ‘You could in fact call it Flevostar 2.0. With a clear expansion strategy, we want to firmly establish ourselves in the international potato trade’, the new General Manager Verhage adds. ‘By doing this we want thereby to build on the old foundation and, in addition to the traditional table potato and export markets, the new company also wants to focus on the cultivation of seed potatoes to sell its own varieties exclusively and to supply to the industry’, the new leader outlines the direction in which he wants to take Flevostar Potato. Market analysis It’s now two years ago that Kodde and Verhage met for the first time. They immediately clicked when they talked about potatoes. ‘We’re both focused on selling potatoes that have a taste that the end-user appreciates’, Kodde explains. As Kodde was looking for a successor for his trading company – the farm has been passionately run by his son Corné for many years – he got the idea to start a new trading company together with Verhage. ‘Flevostar Dronten will stop as a trading company and Flevostar Potato will start. We lease the buildings and the machinery from Flevostar Dronten’, Verhage explains the construction. At the start of the new company, Verhage investigated the current method of operation. ‘The old Flevostar is mainly active in the domestic trade and export. When you analyse our domestic trade, you see three big customers of which Willem Dijk AGF is by far the biggest. In order to collaborate better with them and be more transparent, we held extensive discussions about efficiency improvement. A first step in these discussions was to recruit Willem Dijk’s highly-motivated potato specialist Anton Riezebos. He’s proved his worth in a short period of time and will be the future works manager in Dronten’, Verhage explains. At Willem Dijk, Flevostar has been supplying the Bildtstar potatoes right from the start under the name Tukker Tuffels. ‘Initially, we only supplied the potatoes brushed, but most are now first washed. We don’t wash the potatoes in a wash-drum, but in a brush/wash system we’ve developed in-house and which doesn’t damage the potatoes’, Kodde outlines his views about quality. ‘Actually, with this system we can also export washed potatoes without any problem,’ Kodde indicates the effective functioning. ‘At this Potato World 2016 • number 4 5 Pagina 4
Pagina 6Heeft u een cursus, youcanflip of digitale kranten? Gebruik Online Touch: vaktijdschrift online zetten.
Potatoworld 2016/4 Lees publicatie 42Home