Paul Koppert has a request: to make it clear that this is not about his success, but the success of the company, which he share with his brother Peter, nephew Henri Oosthoek and a thousand employees. This is a reflection of his personality and partly the reason why this wonderful company is hardly known to a wider audience, because publicity is certainly not the ultimate goal.
"Ultimately, the focus should be mainly on hard work and continued innovation." This is what the company has been doing for decades. The history is almost too good to be true. Father Jan, a cucumber grower in the sixties, was suffering the presence of spiders. He used plenty of chemical pesticides, which were becoming ineffective due to growing resistance. Koppert decided to adopt a different approach. In his quest for a natural enemy, he met Swiss researchers who had the so-called predatory mite. This little creature was very effective against spiders as a natural enemy. End of story? No.. Other growers also adopted Koppert's approach, resulting in a much lower use of broad-spectrum chemicals. That, however, caused a whitefly invasion. While many other growers went back to using chemicals, Koppert decided to look for the natural enemies of the whitefly. He found a wasp which was suitable for the task.
Paul Koppert
Innovative character
This approach still characterises how the company operates today, but otherwise, pretty much everything has changed. Father John died soon after his 'discovery'. His sons entered the business. Paul was 17: "I left school and joined the company; I hardly had a choice, you just did that..." We did away with cucumber cultivation in 1978 when it became clear that the future lay in biological pest control. Over the years we also started working with microbiology, "which involves beneficial bacteria or fungi," explains Koppert.
Simply cheaper
The company is currently a global player in its own right in this niche market. "Supermarkets nowadays carry out strict inspections to ensure no poisonous residues are left on fruits and vegetables. That used to be different. The biological approach is simply cheaper and this, as increasingly recognised in recent years, also applies to floriculture.
Hard choices
Research and innovation remains the key to success and each year the company invests 7% of its revenue in research. It takes patience and perseverance, as many projects hit dead ends. "We make it with hard work and some help from the bank." Koppert makes it sound easy, but this is certainly not the case. "In 2000, for example, we lost plenty of ground in the bumblebee business. We had introduced it as a pollinator for greenhouse tomatoes, achieving a great success which provided us with a significant growth. But international competition was fierce and we could not help but move our production and research to Slovakia. That was hard because 100 employees had to leave the company; however, I have learned that you should not avoid or defer such choices because otherwise you run the risk of having your entire business operation fail."
Source: Eyentrepeneurship.nl