SPAWN
‘ We have to raise the bar even higher’
The landscape of the spawn market in Europe is continuing to change. Many spawn producers have mastered the production processes and to a certain extent, they all fish in the same waters. Customers and their demands have also changed. An interview with the Dutch sales team revealed that these are reasons not to slacken, but to continue to come
up with new solutions. By Roel Dreve
2
015 marks the 20th anniversary of the Sylvan Nederland production site at Venrayseweg in Horst. Sylvan’s sales jubilee actually clocks up 40 years selling spawn in Holland. The new General Manager of Sylvan Nederland, Jos Geelen, has been involved right from the start, when he left his parents’ mushroom farm to apply for a job as a project manager at the new Sylvan factory. “Later on, I was responsible for the production site, and I was appointed to succeed Bastiaan Schoenmaker at Sylvan Nederland in November last year.” The factory started production in October 1994, just before Geelen, with a single production line, which was joined three years later by a second line. In 1998, the cooling and loading facilities were expanded and at the same period more Sylvan production locations were established in Europe. The Dutch plant was the company’s first production site outside the USA (with a V-blender of 11,000 litres capacity with batch production). Geelen: “This blender system is still unique in the spawn market. You can produce high volumes of consistent quality. It gives extremely regular mycwelium growth (the bags require no further shaking). Doesn’t that compromise the system’s flexibility? Geelen: “No, as we can inoculate in bulk via the blender, but we can also dose mother cultures in flakes or liquid form when the bags are filled. The latter is somewhat less efficient, but we have the flexi- bility to compromise efficiency for flexibility.”
Changing market
The Dutch sales team has recently been strengthened with the addition of Bart Aldenzee (42), who, just like Geelen, grew up on a mush-
36 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
The new Dutch sales team (l to r): Jos Geelen, Jose Geurts, Ger Hendriks, Harry Hesen and Bart Aldenzee.
room farm. Together with Harry Hesen he is now responsible, as the technical sales representa- tive, for the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Ger Hendriks is more active on the international market and gives compost advice, while John Tinnemans’ tasks are planning and logistics. A sales assistant, Jose Geurts, completes the team. Hesen told us some more about the changes characterising the spawn market: “In com- parison with the past we export more, which is logical seeing as how the domestic market is shrinking and the remaining farms are growing
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