De Heus Animal Nutrition B.V. - production and export of animal feed

We stand in a very long tradition of feed milling. In fact, it started almost 300 years ago, 10 generations ago. The first Mr. de Heus became a miller. From 1911, the company actually developed quite gradually, but really after the Second World War in the 50s and 60s, the animal husbandry started to grow in the Netherlands, and with that, our company could grow. Then during the 1960s, my father also joined the business, and my grandfather and my father grew the business together until 1998. We had almost no clients outside the Netherlands. Of course, we were an international business because of all the raw materials coming from abroad, but on the sales side, we were focusing on the Netherlands. The Netherlands is the market where we have very professional farmers who are well trained. We have very good education systems for our farmers here in the Netherlands. There is also very important the University of Wageningen, which is one of the leading universities in the world for life sciences, and they educate our nutritionists. So the whole complex of agro industry is very strong, and we are proud to be an important part of that.

The basis for our international expansion has been our export division, Coway, which brought us the first contacts in foreign countries. Today, this export division is still, I say sometimes, the cradle for new companies abroad. You see that every market has its own necessities and asks for a different approach. And as an international company, you are able to develop quicker because the knowhow is available and it doesn't need to be invented all new. We already know how to do it; it's just a way of implementing it.

We have seen over the past years that food safety and with that feed safety is very important. What we are doing in this field is that we implement always a very rigorous quality control system where we control our suppliers very closely so that we know that the raw materials that we are using are good, safe, and checked. That guarantees for us that our products are also safe. Always realize that you are producing feed for food for people, and feed safety is our most important value and can never be compromised.

Everywhere around the world we see a lot of different production systems, from small scale to large scale. For example, in the Netherlands we have seen a development of increasing scale all the time and increasing efficiency of the farms. When we look at what is happening in other countries, we see that sometimes they are in a different phase. So for example, in Vietnam or in China we see smaller scale farms, while at the same time in Russia we see an even larger scale than we have usual in the Netherlands. Also in South Africa we see quite a lot of large scale farms. So we have to find solutions for every kind of farm, and not every farmer is the same. So we often say: every farmer his own.

Our slogan is 'Together for better results.' And in that slogan, it's together with our employees and with our customers for a better result. For that, all these values are important. Sometimes I say the growth is in our genes, so we always like to grow our company, to make things better, to give possibilities for our employees to develop themselves within the company, to serve our customers in a good way.