Jan Doldersum started in 1996 as chain manager for Germany at seed company Rijk Zwaan. Three years ago Jan headed to China to become Chain Manager Asia.
What are your main activities?
Half my time I'm working on initiating chain projects in China. The most important is the linking of production to sales. We have through time built up the Integrated Chain Care System (TQM) at Rijk Zwaan. Which work on a closed chain, we now also do this in Asia, amongst others, with the retailers Tesco and Metro. At Tesco now our year-round tomato, cucumber, pepper and eggplant are available. It is not always easy for growers to supply to year-round vegetables of high quality. We at Rijk Zwaan have twelve years of experience - and 140 employees - in China, so we provide the farmers the necessary advice. For the other 50%, I am in other Asian countries like Japan, Korea, India, Malaysia and Thailand. I travel on an annual basis a lot."
What are the biggest challenges?
"You must really build a relationship of trust with the Chinese and that takes a lot of time and energy. It takes a lot to convince people of the value of your product. This also applies to other horticulture suppliers, such as greenhouse builders operating in China. You really must show the added value for a more expensive product than the local suppliers and then you have put a mindset change in motion."
"Furthermore, the vegetable consumption in Asia is very different. The food culture is so different than in the West and fresh salads are still underutilized. With our consumer platform "Love My Salad" we try to increase consumption of fresh vegetables and in particular those of fresh salads. But we still have a long way to go to get the Asian consumers to eat more raw vegetables. In Shanghai and south China oyu can already see processed veg on the shelves, but not the volumes that we used to in Europe. Also tomatoes on the vine are seldom seen. With Chiquita we work with a salad program from Salanova products. We are also trying to introduce 'new' products such as Roman and Batavia lettuce. Our baby cucumbers and tomatoes are included in the Chiquita range.
How do you protect your varieties in China?
We do everything to protect our varieties, but it is very difficult to combat illegal propagation. Here are our varieties of eggplant are grown illegally on a large scale. That's a big problem where much more must be done. We try to counter this by at least having the distribution well organized.