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, when the first Mr. De Heus became a miller. From 1911, the company developed quite gradually, but really after the Second World War, in the 50s and 60s, animal husbandry started to grow in the Netherlands, and with that, our company could grow. 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 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, Koudijs, which brought us the first contacts in foreign countries. Today, this export division is still, I sometimes say, the cradle for new companies abroad. You see that every market has its own necessities and asks for a different approach. As an international company, you are able to develop quicker because the know-how 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.

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 always implement a very rigorous quality control system where we control our suppliers very closely, so that we know that the raw materials 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. 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 usually have 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. 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, and to serve our customers in a good way.