John Vermeiren

John Vermeiren is a successful Belgian tomato grower for many years now and works together with Meteor Systems since the 90's. Meanwhile, his company has grown to such an extent that he owns, together with his partners, several tomato greenhouses, including VW Tuinderijen 8.3 ha, Hortipower 14.5 ha, VW Maxburg 10 ha, Meerfresh 13.6 ha and another 38 ha in America.

John Vermeiren on Meteor Systems

"I bought my first products from Meteor Systems back in the mid-1990s. I can still remember that Meteor Systems was one of the first companies in the world to introduce growing gutters. I was very keen to get away from growing outdoors. After all, growing substrate is much firmer, the roots are no longer in contact with the soil and the airy climate under the growing gutters makes the young crop much more active. In the early stages of the crop, you save on labour as the crop is easier to handle.

One of Meteor Systems' main strengths is personal contact and the fact that you work on new growing techniques together. For example, we jointly designed some combination brackets to simultaneously carry the CO2 tube, the heating pipe and the irrigation tube. Another important aspect for me is the fact that everything is nice and compact and neatly finished and that it all goes where it is supposed to go.

I have always been in close contact with Chris Bastiaansen, and it's the same now with Peter Lexmond. Rens Wijnen handled all the water technology. A while ago I was having problems with irregular dripper outputs. This was quickly dealt with and together we started to look into how it happened. We tested everything in detail, from the installation to the dripper. That's the nice thing about our working relationship: lines of communication are short, and their products are long-lasting and solid – something they are fully committed to."

New Mini-Air and Mini tunnel fruit covers for Reijnders family in Linkhout (Belgium)

The Reijnders family started growing tomatoes on a large scale in 1995. In 2010 they decided to embark on growing fruit as well, starting with kiwi berries. Unfortunately it turned out that this was not profitable, so they switched to strawberry cultivation instead. In 2013 the company stopped growing tomatoes to fully focus on soft fruit, in particular strawberries.