TTA Netherlands

This interview details TTA, an indoor farming technology provider based in the Netherlands. The interview was conducted with Peter Rietveld, Business Development Director at Eurogroep, and with Renko Schuil, Sales Manager Indoor Farming at TTA.

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What is the origin story of TTA? 

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TTA was founded in 1996 and developed, manufactured, and sold automation equipment from the beginning. After a couple of years, we expanded our home market from the flora culture and horticulture market in the USA to include Europe. A subsidiary was opened in Tennessee, USA in 2007 to serve the USA market even better.

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From 2009 our focus shifted to ‘plant handling and selection’. With our own plant vision technology, that was designed in-house, we quickly conquered the market with our vision-supported transplanting and sorting equipment. Two more market approaches were introduced in 2021: forestry and indoor farming. For TTA indoor farming means ‘all closed systems where food is grown, either horizontally or vertically’. Since 2016, TTA is part of Eurogroep. It’s the same family-owned company, but some entities were added in both the solar business and the logistics business. 

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What are some of the biggest challenges facing TTA in the future? 

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We believe that the biggest challenges are still unforeseen, who would have thought something like Covid, with its worldwide aftermath, would strike the world before 2019? But of course, energy prices and energy availability are a big factor for our customers, so any disruption in this matter has an impact on TTA as well. Lastly, the supply chain will be a topic we follow closely. We have built in some guarantees, so we’re not that concerned, but obviously, extreme conditions will always have to be dealt with. 

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What is unique about TTA compared to competitors? 

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First: our focus. Customers rely on our focus, knowing we will not be putting more attention to other businesses suddenly. Within our focus, we will always look for improvements on our equipment obviously. Second, we are very service oriented. No matter what, customers will always have questions or would like to be assisted in their operation.

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We make it our goal always to help the customer quickly and get the question answered. In our opinion, the foundation of excellent service begins with engineering, ensuring that the machine performs its intended function. In terms of Indoor Farming, our USPs (on top of the above), are a deep understanding of the market and putting the produce of the end user first. 

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How do you measure the impact of TTA so far? (Revenue, Employees, Customer Quantity, Production Volume) etc? 

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This is not easy to say, since we act in somewhat volatile markets. Overall, being active in horticulture, forestry, and indoor farming evens out high peaks and low valleys, which causes a balanced strategy. When we look at Indoor Farming alone, we see an increase in basically all parameters as mentioned in your question. We have rapidly increased sales, production volume, customer quantities, and so on.

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More importantly, we believe that the impact should be assessed based on our overall presence in the market. We are in talks with almost all farms out there, we are asked more and more at an early stage to help design the processing areas, we are asked more and more to contribute to panel discussions or give presentations and we are valued more and more for our expertise and basic knowledge of the market. Obviously, these factors are our crowning glory and push us to extend and maintain this role that we are playing. 

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What have you learned that you wish you had known when you joined or started the company? 

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To be honest, nothing. There is no shortcut to success or experience. It is something that comes over time and is always related to the pace of the market itself. Besides, many of the core values of TTA and Eurogroep fit us like a glove anyway and all refer to basic principles we were taught at an early age, like doing what you promise, being yourself, embracing humor, and treating others well. 

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How can people connect with you or learn more about TTA? 

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Look at our websites www.tta.eu and www.eurogroep.com. To get in contact you simply look for us on LinkedIn, reach out to us at the different shows we attend every year, or drop us an E-mail at peter.rietveld@eurogroep.com and renko.schuil@tta.eu. Looking forward to hearing from you!

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