Founder and Managing Director at AgriPlace B.V.

Nico has over 30 years of experience in agriculture, food supply chains and sustainability. He comes from a horticultural family from the Northwest part of Holland. As a child he worked in the fields with his father: growing potatoes, onions, cauliflowers and tulips. After working for IBM and founding a retail company, he founded Natudis BV, an organic food company and wholesaler.

Currently he is managing director of AgriPlace, a Global Compliance Platform.  AgriPlace helps farmers to become certified and traders, retailers and food companies to manage and monitor all compliance documents and data in their supply chain.  Nico: “Our mission is to help create social just and sustainable food supply chains”.

Jointly resolve sustainability issues

Nico: “A platform such as the Sustainable Nut Initiative is important, because it is the chain’s responsibility to jointly resolve issues. This cannot be done by one link in the chain, this requires collaboration between all actors and stakeholders. Opposing interests can occur in the chain, but you also have common interests.  And I believe business should be the driving force, to make our sector more sustainable step by step.

As chairperson I would like to stimulate the process of collaboration: where do we want to go, are we ambitious enough and can we define common milestones. I see this role as supportive and stimulating, but I also want to hold participants accountable for what we agree on. And hopefully we make ourselves redundant in a number of years”.