Our Innovation Centre, built in 2016, is one of the most high-tech research facilities ever built in the sugar industry. It boosts our capabilities, enabling us to bring new and better varieties to market more quickly: sugar beet varieties that offer a higher yield and are more resistant to disease and less reliant on pesticides.
The centre comprises more than 13,000 square metres of glasshouses and 2,000 square metres of laboratories. It provides a home to various research departments, including the breeding department and the disease research laboratory.
These departments have the greatest need of space, as many young plants must be studied in a climate-controlled glasshouse. In this big facility, the teams will perform up to three times more tests. This can only benefit our research work, since the more plants we can examine, the better the quality of the results.
Quicker, easier, more reliable
Rob Van Tetering, former CEO of SESVanderHave, explained why the Innovation Centre is so important to the company: “Farmers in more than fifty countries, from Russia to the US, grow our seeds. This geographical distribution has an influence on our sugar beet varieties. Among other things, the climate patterns, soil types and diseases widely vary between the different countries. At the Innovation Centre, we can analyse all these factors in the smallest detail and offer tailor-made sugar beet varieties. In addition, we are able to separately control the climate of each research compartment at the centre, independently of the weather and the season outside. This means that our young plants grow in a more uniform fashion, without being disturbed by the quirks of the weather. Thanks to new breeding techniques that we use at the Innovation Centre, we are able to investigate an even greater number of young plants even more rapidly, enabling us to develop new varieties almost twice as quickly, which makes a huge difference.”
Take a look behind the scenes at the Innovation Centre in the video below to see how our high-tech automation line significantly increases our capacity – which only increases our chances of success in discovering the best new plants.
Sugar beet research 2.0
The Innovation Centre offers first-class technology under glass. It is one of the most innovative glasshouses and laboratories in our industry. We continue to invest in the latest high-tech research methods. The automation of different procedures enables us to work faster, and innovative biotechnology techniques even allow us to perform a complete analysis of sugar beet DNA in order to carry out more targeted research. This is sugar beet research 2.0.
First-class technology and ecology go hand in hand
The Innovation Centre is also a textbook example of ecologically responsible corporate practice. “The best way to demonstrate this is by means of some impressive figures”, said former CEO Rob van Tetering. “The Innovation Centre collects more than 8 million litres of rainwater, which we can re-use to water our plants. We use LED lamps that are up to 400% more economical than traditional lamps. In addition, we take great care to minimise the environmental impact of our glasshouses: our blackout screens keep light pollution to an absolute minimum.”
