The horticulture industry, like others, has been going through many transformations of recent. Given your global outlook, what would you outline as the main challenges for the industry today?
Concerning supply chain disturbances, the entire industry has been impacted, both in terms of deliveries and costs. We are among those to have felt the impact, as we operate 13 factories located on five continents, with plants in Japan, Sri Lanka, Estonia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Spain, the US, Canada, The Netherlands, etc. Today, things are finally normalizing and I hope that this year will bring us back to the smooth pre-pandemic processes. In the past years the whole value chain built stocks due to long delivery times and price increases. Now, as logistics work better, we are draining stocks both at customer and producer sites.
The industry certainly needs to focus on doing more local-for-local production. That entails that the dependency on imports should be reduced, as a security consideration, but also because of foreign currency risks and climate change. Jiffy has a concrete role to play in that movement towards local farming. For example, we are looking to develop new sustainable fibers, which are of local origin, thus trying to reduce intercontinental transportation of fibers. That is not an easy task, because we are talking about enormous volumes.
How involved is Jiffy in novel agri trends, such as indoor farming and how promising are these developments?
I think indoor farming is a huge trend. As an example, in 2019 we ran an experiment at the Trial and Demo centers in Qatar, in collaboration with the Wageningen University and a variety of innovative Dutch horticultural suppliers. Together we run a pilot in a water saving greenhouse to prove best yields and water savings potential and to see how much more tomatoes can be produced locally in a high-tech greenhouse compared to outdoors. The results were 5 kg per square meter outdoors and 100 kg per square meter indoors; moreover, the water and mineral consumption indoors was 99% less than that outdoors. In other words, thanks to indoor farming they can now have local tomato produce in Qatar. That signifies a new era.
What are your plans for partnerships and expansion in the indoor farming market in North America, given the sharp rise in activity in this space?
Partnerships are a part of Jiffy’s DNA. To illustrate, CEA (controlled environment agriculture) growers are very demanding, because they need more than just a product, they need competence. For this, they really need reliable partners like ourselves. It is for this reason that we are one of the key drivers in the CEA segment in the U.S., which is itself the key global player. Still, such companies are expanding to the rest of the world, and we follow them with our expertise. There are still some challenges in the sector, notably regarding better energy efficiency, but, overall, I think that CEA is the solution for the future.
Are we moving towards a plant-based diet and is this transformation being driven by the demand side?
I think so. Nowadays big companies like Burger King have started implementing this change, so that is a strong sign that the trend is underway. Today’s solutions provide for plant-based products that are hard to differentiate taste-wise from real meat, for example.
Jiffy has declared its intention to reduce emissions by 25% by the end of 2025, in the context of an industry that accounts for 25% of global GHG emissions. How do you see this reduction in practice?
More and more of the future growth in food production will come from indoor farming. This industry has started with what one might call the ‘easy picks’, such as salad, tomato, and herbs, but in the future the variety of products will expand. This transformation is needed to control not just the CO2 footprint, but equally water, minerals, use of pesticides, etc. Our contribution to reducing CO2 is both via the logistical part and indirectly since plants consume CO2 when growing, and indoor farms utilize considerable volumes of CO2 to get the plants to grow faster. We also focus on implementing hi-tech solutions (95% of our products fit this category), which further helps reduce our footprint.
What are some innovations in the pellet and related segments in your industry that you feel excited about?
In 2008 we acquired a company that developed the Preforma plug, which is now the key plug used in the CEA business in the U.S. Lately, we have developed a product called Flexistart, which looks like a substrate mix that can be put by the grower into a pot or a tray and it reacts to water, creating its own plug. Moreover, our pellets have recently all switched to PLA netting, which is a fine-fiber bio-web made of polylactic acid, thus reducing the use of plastics. We are also currently developing a new kind of pellet, which does not need a net like the original pellets developed in the 1960s. Even without a net, that pellet keeps its firmness and stays together.
What is your vision for horticulture and main goals for Jiffy for the coming years?
The global horticulture industry has the potential to play a more strategic role in the local availability of fruits, vegetables, and herbs, while reducing the environmental footprint of the use of CO2, water, minerals, pesticides, and arable land. That is cardinal for us. All these trends also open opportunities for emerging markets to produce their own food, which also reduces their need to hold foreign currency reserves.
