History

Cerescon was founded in November 2014 by Ad and Marc Vermeer and Thérèse van Vinken.

Read here how Cerescon started.

Ad Vermeer has more than 30 years’ experience in high-tech machine development in a variety of roles, in particular in the field of development management and system architecture. Ad is also the co-founder of the successful high-tech start-up, SoLayTec B.V. He has overall responsibility for technology.

Over a period of 30 years, Thérèse van Vinken has held various positions in project management, marketing and marketing communications at Philips, FEI and ASML. Until July 2020, she was responsible for General management, operational management as well as for marketing. Meanwhile, this role has been taken over by Denick Murraij and Thérèse is responsible for Business Development.

Marc Vermeer had been an asparagus grower for more than 25 years (Vermeer Asperges Leende). It was Ad and Marc who first came up with the idea of automatic selective harvesting. Sadly, Marc was only able to see the beginnings of Cerescon: after a short illness he passed away in December 2014. In the meantime, Ad and Thérèse continue with the work, together with the input of asparagus application know-how from the UserGroup and the Wageningen University of Research.

Cerescon is the first business worldwide to have successfully demonstrated the viability of an automatic selective asparagus harvesting machine. Selective harvesting means that only individual asparagus with the correct size requirements are picked: the remaining asparagus must be left undisturbed for several days before being harvested. Cerescon is taking up the challenge of creating a successful product from this exciting innovation and so enable the company to meet its ambition of becoming a world leader in changing the face of asparagus cultivation.

Every growing season, demonstrations are organized for interested growers.

Are you an asparagus grower with a serious interest in Cerescon’s innovative new technology and would like to attend a product demonstration? If so, make this known by filling out our Contact form.

Brabant-bases family-owned company develops world's first selective asparagus harvester

Written by: Johanna Kroon -- https://www.johannakroon.nl/

It all began at a fun family birthday party of the large Brabant-based farming family Vermeer. Son Ad, who is a freelance inventor, got a call from his asparagus-growing brother Marc: ‘Hey, you're an inventor, can’t you invent an asparagus harvester?’ Marc explained that it was becoming increasingly difficult to earn a living growing asparagus: seasonal workers were becoming harder to find and all possible ways to cut costs within the existing harvesting method had already been conceived. In Germany, Europe’s largest asparagus country, a new law had recently gone into effect: asparagus planters from outside Germany had to be paid the German minimum wage, €9.00 per hour instead of €6.00. Many German asparagus growers were already playing with the idea of moving their businesses to a low-wage country, which would mean a death blow for asparagus cultivation in Western Europe. A well-functioning asparagus harvester could prevent that.

And so, the Vermeer brothers decided to conduct some research. Naturally the first question was: has an attempt ever been made to build an asparagus harvester? It turned out that it had in fact been attempted, a number of times, even. Machines had been designed and built, but never sold. The same problem was always encountered: how can the machine find the asparagus to be harvested? The human eye easily sees the tips of the asparagus emerging from the soil, but a camera can barely see a difference between an asparagus tip and a random glint in the sand. Now and then, the machine skips over wonderfully tender asparagus tips, only to turn all its attention to an unsuspecting white pebble. Moreover, it isn’t ideal to harvest asparagus whose tips have already emerged; every millimeter of an asparagus that emerges above the ground reduces its value. There isn’t, however, any choice when it comes to manual harvesting. But asparagus grower Marc had a revolutionary new take on the problem: the machine should detect and harvest the asparagus before they even emerged from the sand – i.e. subsurface detection – and his brother the inventor would just have to come up with a way to make it possible.......

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