East-West Seed Brand Guidelines: Simon Groot’s 1982 Tropical Vegetable Seed Venture

A Dutch seed family, a Filipino trader and a farm in Batangas.

East-West Seed was founded in the Philippines in 1982. Its founder, Simon N. Groot, came from Enkhuizen in the Netherlands and was, English Wikipedia says, a sixth-generation member of the family seed business Sluis & Groot. The company’s own history says he had seen the problems of smallholder farmers in the tropics on his travels as that firm’s marketing director, and that he saw poor-quality seed as a cause of low harvests. Wikipedia says the family business had been sold by 1981 and that Groot used his share of the proceeds to start the new company. East-West Seed says Sluis & Groot is now part of Syngenta.

Groot did not start alone. His partner was Benito Domingo, a Filipino seed trader, and the company says the venture combined European seed technology with Asian knowledge of tropical farming. It was first registered as Hortigenetics Philippines, Inc. and later renamed East-West Seed, a name the company says stands for that partnership between the East, meaning Asia, and the West, meaning Europe.

Breeding began straight away. The company says its first trial was planted in 1982 on a five-hectare farm in Batangas, south of Manila, called Hortanova, or “new garden.” It describes itself as the first market-oriented vegetable breeding company in Southeast Asia. In 1984, with Thai partners, it set up what it calls the first commercial vegetable breeding farm in the Chiang Mai valley in northern Thailand, where work began on a Thai bitter gourd hybrid.

The early market was not easy. Wikipedia, drawing on Groot’s own accounts, says it was at first hard to persuade Filipino farmers to switch to hybrid seed, and that only about a fifth of farmers in the country had done so by 1992.

Bitter gourd and the tropical vegetable list.

East-West Seed’s first commercial success was a bitter gourd. The company says that in 1986 it introduced Jade Star, which it describes as the first locally developed commercial vegetable hybrid in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and that bitter gourd is still one of its flagship crops. Wikipedia says the company built its F1 hybrids from local cultivars, including a popular Thai pepper.

The crop list reads like a tropical market stall rather than a European seed catalogue. Alongside tomato, hot pepper, cucumber and watermelon, the company’s site lists okra, kangkong, yardlong bean, basella and a family of gourds: bitter, wax, snake, sponge, ridge and bottle. The company says it now offers more than 600 varieties across 80 crops and exports to more than 80 markets. The Access to Seeds Index, in its 2019 company scorecard for Eastern and Southern Africa, counted more than 900 hybrid and open-pollinated varieties in the portfolio.

Expansion followed the farms it was built for. Wikipedia says the company sold first in the Philippines, then in Thailand by the late 1980s and Indonesia in the 1990s, before reaching the rest of Southeast Asia and, from the late 2000s, East Africa. The company’s own list of countries now includes India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar and Malaysia in Asia; Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda in Africa; and Brazil, Guatemala and Mexico in Latin America.

The Access to Seeds Index, an independent benchmark of how seed companies serve smallholder farmers, gives East-West Seed a prominent place. Its scorecard says the company led the 2016 global index for vegetable seed companies and the regional index for Eastern Africa, and ranked third in the 2019 Eastern and Southern Africa index. It says most of the company’s customers are smallholders, that a breeding programme in Tanzania works on nine local crops such as African eggplant and amaranth, and that smallholder farmers produce 95 percent of the company’s seed in Tanzania.

Seed brands and their marks.

Vegetable seed companies sell something their customers rarely see in finished form. A breeder’s product is a variety: a tomato, a pepper, a carrot or a cabbage with traits that took years of crossing and selection to fix. The seed itself is small, dry and uniform, so most of these companies present themselves through what the seed becomes, and through the places where it is tested.

That is why the same images recur across the category. Trial fields in rows, greenhouses filled with trained tomato and cucumber plants, and close views of leaves and roots show the work of selection. Catalogues and websites favour cut tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers photographed on white, so that colour, shape and the inside of the fruit can be compared. Named varieties carry much of the message.

The audience is professional. Breeders such as these sell to commercial growers, propagators, processors and retailers rather than to home gardeners, and their packs and brochures carry practical information on sowing, growing conditions and the traits each company claims for its varieties. Several firms also show the stages that follow breeding: seed production by contract growers, then cleaning, sorting, germination testing and packing.

Open days are the most public face of the trade. In the north of North Holland, where companies including Enza Zaden and Bejo belong to the Seed Valley network, breeders invite customers to walk their trial fields and greenhouses each year; in September 2023 NH Nieuws reported that Bejo’s open days in Warmenhuizen drew visitors from about 70 countries. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, and marks clearly what rests on its own word.

A World Food Prize and a head office in Thailand.

The company’s centre moved from the Philippines to Thailand. The Access to Seeds Index scorecard describes East-West Seed as now headquartered in Thailand, and the company’s contact page gives its group head office in Nonthaburi, on the northern edge of Bangkok. The company says its chief executive is Jean-Christophe Filippi, who joined in April 2023.

Knowledge has been part of the offer as well as seed. The Access to Seeds Index says that in 2015 the company set up Knowledge Transfer, a foundation that trains smallholder vegetable farmers, and that by 2019 it ran extension work in Tanzania and Uganda. The index also says the company led its 2019 regional ranking on intellectual-property policy, with company-wide commitments on farm-saved seed and the breeders’ exemption.

The founder’s honours made the name known outside the seed trade. Wikipedia says Groot received the Mansholt Award for sustainable entrepreneurship in 2015 and, in 2019, the World Food Prize, cited for helping smallholder farmers in more than 60 countries earn more through vegetable production. The company adds that he was a founding member of the Asia and Pacific Seed Association in 1994 and received an honorary doctorate from Naresuan University in Thailand in 2011.

The identity follows the name. East-West is a description of a partnership, Dutch breeding and Filipino trade,, and the company presents itself through tropical vegetable crops and smallholder farmers in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

For a design guide, East-West Seed shows a company whose name is its founding story and whose stated audience is the smallholder farmer. Compare Rijk Zwaan, a Dutch vegetable breeder, and Syngenta, which the company names as the present home of its founder’s family firm. For this guide we use gourd green, monsoon teal and Batangas clay with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep East-West Seed’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.