"We never say no, that's our claim to fame"
Source: VFD.com
Part Five: Inside Koppert Cress on the Hightech Horti Innovation Tour 2026 "We never say no, that's our claim to fame" After the morning's stop at HIC Venture Studio and the Delphy Improvement Center, the Hightech Horti Innovation Tour 2026 group arrived in Monster for lunch at Koppert Cress, followed by a tour of the company's greenhouses, cold store and energy systems. That means new products and tastes (the company grows around 80 different products, including Dutch vanilla and seaweed), and new process technology aimed at being as sustainable as possible.
"We want to inspire them, make them a little bit of a fan of Koppert Cress, and a fan of the culture in general." Because the company doesn't ship directly to chefs, it relies on 35 colleagues based across Europe and the Middle East to maintain that relationship with the end user, cooking, demonstrating and exhibiting at trade fairs to keep its products in front of the people actually using them. Geothermal energy is one product of that density: Koppert Cress is too small to develop a geothermal project alone, so it shares one with 25 neighboring growers and seven other corporations, drilled two and a half kilometers deep, supplying heat across the wider region through a shared network.
© Wesley Francis | VerticalFarmDaily.com Bart van Meurs in Koppert Cress' Edible Jungle area © Wesley Francis | VerticalFarmDaily.com Every species on display is edible or has edible parts, and the space hosts demonstrations and cooking sessions for the roughly 6,000 visitors Koppert Cress receives each year Never say no On the packing floor, van Meurs described the staff there as the last line of quality control. "If that box arrives with a chef in Rome or Madrid, these are the last people to see it." With around 80 different products, many of it difficult to standardize, the company leans on technology to take the repetitive or physically demanding work out of the job, both to make it more enjoyable and to retain staff long-term.
Why this matters: For operators, this is a water-management story. The useful signal is that direct substrate measurements can help cut drain loss materially without giving up yield or fruit quality, which is exactly the kind of controllable efficiency gain a facility can build on.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does substrate sensing matter in free-drain strawberry systems?
Because drain percentage tells a grower what already happened, while substrate moisture and EC data show root-zone conditions directly. That makes it easier to cut water loss without guessing.
What is the operator takeaway from this trial?
If the thresholds are understood well enough, growers can reduce drain water materially while protecting yield and fruit quality, which makes sensing an operational tool instead of a reporting tool.
