50th anniversary Hotraco

Hotraco: “simplicity and reliability”

May 7th Hotraco celebrates its 50th anniversary. A good time to look back at five decades marked by continuous innovation, market expansion and quality assurance in process automation within the agribusiness. For Hotraco Horti, the story began in 2002. Veteran Jan Christiaens and his successor Leon Tacken look back and ahead.

Family business

The Hotraco head office is still located in the same location where it once started as a family business: Hegelsom in northern Limburg, on the eastern edge of the Peel. Fifty years ago, this region was mainly dominated by intensive livestock farming, supplemented by technical industry and greenhouse horticulture. Many farms were preparing for an increase in scale. This called for new solutions to mechanise and automate business processes, such as climate control. Four young, ambitious, starting entrepreneurs with an agricultural and technical background, including Chris and Anny Beelen, saw this as an excellent opportunity to focus their company on that.

Reliable control technology

In May 1974, Hotraco was registered with the Chamber of Commerce. There were no real premises yet. From the proverbial 'barn behind the house', the quartet started designing and assembling transformers and thermostats with potentiometers to control the climate for livestock housing. From day one, Chris and Anny had their own, as it turned out later, sharp vision of the desired direction of development. Even then, the company had a reputation for building rock-solid equipment characterized by outstanding reliability. It was also the first company to build central switchboards. These offered more overview and convenience for users and were also easier to install and maintain than the separate boxes that hung scattered in stables. "In the early days, everything was mainly about simplicity and solidity," says Jan Christiaens, who joined in 1979 as one of the first permanent employees.

The future

It is our goal to serve our customers with new innovative, problem-specific & technical solutions. This enables us to develop a suitable system for every horticultural company, for every application and for every climate condition.

Whatever the future holds, we will always remain true to our:

“Simplicity and reliability"

Acknowledgements

We could not have reached this milestone without your support.

Therefore, we would like to thank all our employees and their families, our business partners and suppliers - past and present - for their role in our 50-year history.