Baan believes the hospitality industry will never be the same again. Chefs will stay and employ their craftsmanship in different ways. “Think of food boxes. People can cook at home under guidance of a chef on tv. There are more ways to reach the plate.”

Already before Covid-19 Koppert Cress was diversifying. Next to the location in Monster in The Netherlands, Koppert Cress “already has a franchising system with several companies in Japan, Korea, Autralia, Turkey, and the United States. We teach them our greenhouse system, our marketing system, and we challenge chefs locally. Besides that I sell the seeds”, Baan explains.

For the rest of it Baan sticks to his business model: one cannot prepare for 1 million restaurants closing down worldwide.

Rob Baan, the Steve Jobs of Dutch Horticulture
Rob Baan (Haarlem, 1956) is the owner of Koppert Cress, a producer of micro vegetables. He created the company in 2002. His cresses - sprout vegetables - are used globally by the world's leading chefs and restaurants. Koppert Cress has quite a reputation as an innovator in the Dutch greenhouse industry. He was a frontrunner in using LED light. His latest project is harvesting summer sunlight and store it as thermal energy 6.500 feet.

His unusual perspectives define his unique profile in the field of food and health in the Netherlands and far abroad. His personal mission: "Let's look at fresh food and health in a different way."

Koppert Cress
Koppert Cress is on a never-ending quest to find natural, innovative plants, herbs, fruits and weed that chefs can use to surprise their customers. They intensify taste, make both beautiful and tasty presentations and offer new experiences (such as a now famous herb that literally electrifies and waters your mouth, first used by Ferran Adriá's famous restaurant El Bulli in Roses at the Spanish Costa Brava.) An international network of biologists, plant experts and gastronomists support a steady flow of new products, that meet the ever higher culinary demands of restaurants around the world. The latest we tasted was a succulent seaweed tasting both oily and crispy and yet fully natural and cultivated to preserve nature form wild harvesters.