Hats off for the Anthura grower days!

This year the Anthura grower days took place on Thursday April 23 and Friday April 24. Over 150 relations were present at the successful grower days. Anthura offered ample opportunity for an extensive visit to Anthura Flower (the demonstration greenhouse) where many new varieties were shown. Both days were opened by commercial director Marco van Herk.

A lot of people also visited the construction site of the new greenhouse. The new greenhouse includes in total approximately 12 ha with a total floor area of 140.000 m2. Modern and innovative techniques are applied, among which three techniques that are developed by Anthura itself, namely Diafragmascreen®, KasinKas (greenhouse in greenhouse) and Counterflow. The new greenhouse is built at the Cyclamenweg in Bleiswijk and will be officially opened in the autumn of 2009.

On Thursday April 23 the cut flower culture of Anthurium and Phalaenopsis were on the programme.

Five market leaders, one vision
Ron de Lange is manager at Grow4U. He shared his expertise and experience with regard to success of cooperation. It was an interesting story about the preconditions, ambitions and aims of collaboration. Ron indicated clearly how Grow4U collaborates and which results they aim to achieve.

Anthura update
Hans Prins, account manager for the cut flower culture of Anthura, discussed together with his colleague, Eveliene Hartmanns, who is responsible for PR and marketing, the developments in the area of marketing issues, packing and promotion.

After a visit to the impressive demonstration greenhouse, new varieties were discussed over a delicious Italian buffet.

Friday April 24 the Anthurium and Phalaenopsis pot plant culture was the central point.

Dutch Creations
Eveliene Hartmanns presented with concrete examples the joint activities of some important breeders in the Netherlands: Dutch Creations. The website of Dutch Creations has grown to an interesting medium, for growers and other companies that are related to the horticulture. The amount of visitors of the website is high and promising and the digital newsletter is received worldwide with great enthusiasm.

The aim of Dutch Creations is mainly to inspire florists and indirect consumers with the objective to enlarge the name recognition of its varieties. The connection with web shops of exporters offers new possibilities and a new module ‘Find a grower’ provides transparency in the chain.

Is there a need of additional support by Anthura for the promotion of the end products of its customers? A possible initiative was explained by Frank van Mil of the company Pull Position, a bureau for strategy, marketing and sales in the horticultural sector. Prior to this, he talked about the current and future market situation and the possibilities of cooperation.

By means of propositions the afternoon became interactive and all participants could think along with and give their opinion about the chances of collaboration, the possibilities for the products Anthurium and Phalaenopsis and the commitment of Anthura as breeder to the support in promotion and sales of these products.

Hats on, hats off
The quiz ‘Hats on, hats off’ of the VPRO programme ‘Holland Sport’ of Wilfried de Jong was used as a tool to get the discussion going. By means of the hats (green for Anthurium, yellow for Phalaenopsis and white for trade) and under the supervision of discussion leader Van Mil the participants were asked to give their opinion.

Each game should have a winner, so also in this quiz. The winner Carl Grootscholte of Carl Sales Support won the well-known sports bag.

Anthura looks back with great pleasure on these two busy and successful Dutch grower days.