The main building to the right, storage to the left and the new SacO2 building in the back.
The team in the new conference room (l to r): Kasper, Pascale, Roel and Magda.
What has also remained is the open and transpa- rent character of the company and the urge to share its expertise through training and consul- tancy services, although Mycelia now gives less training on location. A stylish, new conference room has been provided in Nevele for the popular spawn and substrate training programmes. According to Magda, there are also new paths ahead for the company: “One spearhead of Mycelia at the moment is developing new recipes. Some strains of spawn don’t flourish well on our recipe, so we adapt certain ingre- dients. That can even go to extremes, but only in exceptional cases, where a customer provides very specific ingredients. We are also doing more research into other applications of moulds, such as biological control. As you can see, the ball in the world of mould keeps on rolling!”
Smoother and stronger Roel carries on: “What SacO2 then does is develop bags with, for example, a high rate of gas exchange. That illustrates the advance of being literally so close well, every month we come up with something new.” Kasper agreed and explains more “The majority of our research still relates to daily practice. We aspire to be the very best in our field, making superior quality products.” SacO2 does have some competition internatio- nally, namely from Unicorn. “But no matter how outstanding our products are, spawn suppliers will never source 100% from us, even if only for safety reasons”, says Roel. SacO2 does not work with dealers or representatives. The strategy is maintaining personal contact with its custo- mers. “The bag market is small and there isn’t a lot to explain about using the bags. We have a representative for Microsacs and Microbox in the
USA though, Fam van de Heyning. We took a tour of the premises. There are now three buildings in Nevele; the main building that houses Mycelia, a new warehouse mainly for storage of raw materials and a new production hall and warehouse for SacO2.
The complete production line, engineered by the company to a unique design, produces fully finished, ready to use, welded bags that can have up to as many as six filter seams. This is effi- cient, results in fewer quality-related problems and makes it easier to control the product, according to Roel. “We now have two main production lines for the bags, polyethylene and polypropylene, but with the PE bags you widely vary the filters and gas exchange rates. SacO2 used to work with ‘cast’ material as the basis for the polypropylene bags. “New is that we now use ‘blast’ material, which is smoother and at the same time stronger. We are still running lots of tests, but so far we are really enthusiastic about this material”, says Roel. He smiles. “Okay, a bag is a bag, but if anything goes wrong with it, you don’t only lose the bag, but also the sensi- tive product it contains. That’s why we con- stantly work on improving the bags and filters.” The tour ends in the new conference room where we say farewell. I would usually then smoke a quick cigarette with Jos. But I have quit and so has Jos.
Mycelia, which is also one of the sponsors of the ISMS conference in Amsterdam, is in stand 19 at the Dutch Mushroom Days. SacO2 is in the neighbouring stand, number 17.
“If anything goes wrong with the
bag, you lose the contents too”
MUSHROOM BUSINESS 39
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