Hotraco Agri
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Anniversary of Hotraco: 50 Years of Innovation and Growth
This year, Hotraco Group celebrates its 50th anniversary – a milestone we’re celebrating in a big way. To mark this special occasion, we’ve put together a timeline showcasing Hotraco’s growth through a series of groundbreaking moments from the past. Through this timeline, interviews, and articles, we’re reflecting on our history. For this fourth article, we asked Eric Hagens, Product Manager, to look back on the 2000s, a decade characterized by many innovations.
Part 4: The innovative 2000s
By now, we had passed the turn of the millennium, the HDC was almost 20 years old, and with digitalization rapidly advancing, Hotraco couldn’t afford to be left behind. The Orion product line was developed with a key innovation. Eric explains: “The Orion product line featured a graphical display. That meant we could display icons, such as a thermometer or fan symbol. Our products became user-friendly for people who had difficulty with language, but also for markets in countries like China and South Korea. While our HDC offered translations, non-European languages were not yet included. The Orion opened doors to international markets.” The new technology developed in the Orion wasn’t just used in climate control systems for livestock but extended to other sectors as well. The Orion MC was introduced to the horticulture sector. And shortly after, the EMEC egg counter became a unique product in the poultry sector. All these innovations earned Hotraco the Business Award in the Horst aan de Maas region.
Freedom for the Customer
But perhaps what mattered most to the customer was the ability to remotely control the system. You no longer needed to be physically present on-site to make daily adjustments. For some customers, this meant newfound freedom. “After the Orion had been on the market for a while, I was in contact with a young man and his father,” begins Eric. “The father wasn’t very skilled with technology, so the son was hesitant to leave the farm for extended periods. When he learned that he could control the Orion using his phone, he finally felt comfortable enough to go away on a trip with friends to Barcelona. He later came back, beaming, to tell me that from a café terrace in Barcelona, using Hotraco’s app, he had helped his father fix a feed issue with the livestock back home. He came by to thank us personally!” Eric shares proudly. “Many people experienced the newfound freedom that mobile phones brought. We extended that freedom to agro-users by integrating it into our systems. This is emblematic of the way we continually strive to apply new technologies in our agro-solutions.”