Ermelo- Van Drie Groep

Today was a normal lecture in the morning. Even though this 3 week course is supposed to be about european business skills, this week is a refresher of marketing. It is frustrating to be in a class with people of all different levels. I have taken 3 years of marketing classes where others don't know what marketing is. So to play it fair, the professor started at the beginning to explain marketing... This sucks because I have heard it all before and I am paying for a class where I am not learning anything new. All the models he introduces to us are all familiar to me as well. Good thing I brought my sudoku book and the girl in front of me was watching the olympics so I didn't fall asleep. 

After a quick lunch break, we went on another company visit. I really enjoy our main lecturer, Bart Touring because he introduces us to many practical applications of the things we have learned in class. He believes in throwing us into a situation and making us work our way out of it which I really like. We drove to Ermelo in the beautiful veluwe (forest) of Holland. Here we visited one location of the Van Drie Group- the biggest producer of Veal in the world. The plant we visited made milk replacer but we got a great explanation about the company as a whole and the supply chain of veal.

Many students were not very intersted in this but I had my eyes and ears wide open!

Navobi- Milk replacer plant

Big silos with raw materials. "It sinks!", well I only smelled milk replacer which is not that smelly....

Storage of the bags

One interesting thing is that their whole production process is just-in-time, meaning that they order and sell ingredients when they need to. They do not store much at their plant because storage costs MONEY! 


After a Q&A session, a presentation and a tour, we went back to Utrecht. Unfortunately, today was a beautiful sunny summer day with lots of sun and hot weather but I was stuck inside the school and a bus all day. 
When I got home, I had to work on my assignment so there was not time to enjoy this rare weather. We have to do a final group project about a company and an industry. To avoid what happened in our previous presentation where we had the exact same speech as another group, I suggested that we talk about the dairy industry in Holland and FrieslandCampina as a company! I also chose it because our professor, Bart, comes from a dairy farm, is interested in the agricultural businesses and grew up in Friesland. I am going to collect a lot of brownie points hopefully!