On Tuesday, 16 April, Dutch-based World Horti Center hosted its seventh I-Grow Inside webinar, this time around discussing the pros and cons of private equity in horticulture and how these investments have shaped the horticultural landscape over the past decades. The event left attendees with more questions than answers.
Mathijs van den Beukel moderated the webinar in good English. He conducted a panel of three experts, including Maarten Hermus, account manager of Foreign Investment Horticulture & Food at Innovation Quarter, Frank Bogovic, COO and vice-chairman of the executive committee at Finance & Invest Brussels, and Wilco Schoonderbeek, director of investments at Horticoop.
Innovation Quarter
Innovation Quarter is a regional, semi-public development agency that acts as a network of organisational links between researchers, government and business, and an investor through its EU-powered Innovation Quarter Capital, Energiq, Uniq, and Energy Transition Fund Rotterdam funds, which combined have €300 million available for investment in disruptive startups and scale-ups, energy innovations and sustainable projects.
In horticulture, Innovation Quarter’s Unique fund helped finance Condi Food, a company that increases quality in the food sector through automated visual inspection; Longbloom, a company that preserves peonies and orchids using supercritical carbon dioxide; GearBox, a company that combines AI and vision technology for digital quality inspection of fruits and vegetables, and Pats, a Delft-based company using drones to combat pests in horticultural crops.
Innovation Quarters’ Maarten Hemus confirms that investments in horticulture companies grow.
Finance & Invest Brussels
Finance & Invest Brussels is also a semi-public investment vehicle that stimulates the economic development of the greater Brussels area. Its COO, Frank Bogovic, says the company invests venture capital in startups and relatively small-sized companies through direct investments, private equity in bigger companies, and indirect investments in other investment (agriculture and biotech) funds.
Horticoop
Horticultural supplier Horticoop founded a 280-member investment cooperative in 2021 to stimulate and improve the horticulture’s sector green credentials. Its director of investments, Wilco Schoonderbeek, explains that they invest in companies with long track records in horticulture and a solid return. Their customers include investors from outside the agriculture world who use Horticoop’s Investment branch to bring in horticultural knowledge.
Conclusions
The panel members explained what their respective companies do, which is easy to find on their websites. The webinar focused on fruits and vegetables and less on ornamentals.
More generally, one can conclude that the speakers share two goals: to invest in companies that stimulate Innovations and have a good return on their investment. The challenges for the companies they are investing in are speeding up the technologies they are using and bringing the company to the next growth stage.
Investment companies sometimes face the unwillingness of entrepreneurs to have an investor who interferes with their management. Sometimes, the investor wants to focus on a certain company activity, while the board of directors wants to make other decisions.
The webinar informed that the USA will account for 30 per cent of capital investments in the future, Europe for 30 per cent, and the rest of the world for 40 per cent.
Unfortunately, there was no representative of a commercial private investor operating on his own risks when investing in flower and plant companies, as with Dümmen Orange and Royal van Zanten.
I also dearly missed some statistics: How many private equity companies invest in horticulture, how much money is involved, and is private equity in ornamental horticulture growing? The webinar also left questions unanswered about the pros and cons of private equity investments compared to bank investments.
This article was first published in the June 2024 issue of FloraCulture International.
