Hoogendoorn Brand Guidelines: The Vlaardingen Climate-Computer Maker Behind TUCO and IIVO

A small technical firm that turned to computers.

Hoogendoorn Growth Management is based in Vlaardingen, the port town just west of Rotterdam. The company says it was founded there in 1967 as a small technical installation business, and that it introduced its first digital horticultural computer in 1974.

The 1974 machine was called TUCO. In February 2026 the trade site HortiDaily carried a company announcement in which Hoogendoorn described TUCO as the first climate computer for greenhouse horticulture, a claim we give as the company’s own. The same announcement said that 150 TUCO systems were built in total, each one assembled and tested by hand by one of the engineers who had worked on its development, and quoted managing director Peter Hendriks calling TUCO the first step in the digital revolution of greenhouse horticulture.

Hoogendoorn’s own site says the company has developed greenhouse process computers ever since, aimed at the use of water, climate and energy, and that it now works in more than 100 countries through a network of partners on every continent, with specialists who give advice, training and service. It describes itself as an innovator in horticultural automation, with more than fifty years of experience; that is its own description.

The company’s web address has moved with its name. A November 2016 HortiDaily item still gave it as hoogendoorn.nl; that address now forwards to hoogendoorn.com, which carries the longer name Hoogendoorn Growth Management, offered in Dutch, German, English, Spanish and French.

From TUCO to iSii to IIVO.

Hoogendoorn’s product story is a sequence of climate computers. After TUCO came iSii, which the company still lists among the systems it calls industry standards, and then IIVO, which it now describes as a next-generation greenhouse control system combining its own software with new hardware. The company says IIVO controls lighting, from conventional high-pressure sodium lamps to dimmable and multispectrum LED systems, works with industry-standard sensors, smart cameras and irrigation systems, and monitors climate, carbon dioxide and water use. Its tagline for the system is “Greenhouse, powerhouse.”

The changeover is now formal. In October 2025 HortiDaily reported that Hoogendoorn would stop selling iSii on 1 January 2026 and put its full commercial focus on IIVO. According to the report, existing iSii customers keep service, development support and spare parts; sales director Kevin Spoelder was quoted saying the company wanted to concentrate on one platform and that IIVO was better prepared for autonomous growing.

Around the climate computer the company has built a set of named services. Intelligent Algorithms is its name for software that takes over parts of climate and irrigation control; Hoogendoorn 360° and Hoogendoorn Online are its service and remote-support offers; Work-IT is a wireless registration system that records labour, harvest, crop health and production data by smartphone, tablet or group key. The company also runs training courses and a programme it calls Hoogendoorn AcadeMe, and its menu links to LetsGrow.com, a data platform for growers.

The thinking behind IIVO is presented as a growing method. The company says the system is built on the principles of Growing by Plant Empowerment, which treats crop growth as a matter of three balances — energy, water and assimilation — and it describes itself as a founding partner of the Plant Empowerment Foundation. It says it employs plant physiologists, biologists and physicists alongside its software engineers, and that it writes its own software from scratch. It also says it holds ISO 27001, ISO 9001, HortiQ and UL certification.

How greenhouse technology presents itself.

Greenhouse builders sell something most people never see from the inside: a glass roof that can run for hectares, the steel and aluminium that holds it up, and the heating, cooling, water and climate systems below it. Their pictures tend to repeat a small set of scenes. Long glasshouse roofs catch low evening light; inside, tomato and pepper rows climb toward hanging gutters, shade screens sit half-drawn under the glass, and a climate computer glows on a grower’s desk. The images sell scale and control rather than a single product.

Much of the Dutch side of the trade grew up in and around the Westland, the district south-west of The Hague that Dalsem calls the traditional heart of Dutch horticulture. Certhon gives its headquarters as Poeldijk, in the Westland, and Dalsem gives its address as Den Hoorn, close by. Dalsem traces itself to a blacksmith who started work in the Westland in 1932, and Certhon says it began as a family business in 1896; both have since passed to larger groups, and the guides in this series set out who owns what today and when that changed.

The trade meets at fairs. GreenTech Amsterdam, held at the RAI exhibition centre, said in January 2018 that it would become an annual event, and builders use their stands as showrooms: in June 2022 Certhon said its stand had a large greenhouse deck hanging from the hall’s truss, with a harvesting robot on display beneath it. Trade titles such as Hortidaily report the projects, product launches and changes of ownership that follow.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — when it began, who owns it, where it says it works and what it makes — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and type are our own interpretation, not the companies’ identities.

One of thirteen companies in a Dutch technology group.

Hoogendoorn belongs to a larger group. Its website says that, together with twelve other independently positioned companies, it is part of Batenburg Techniek, a Dutch technology group that it says employs more than 1,200 people under the line “Smarter focus. Brighter tomorrow.” The group link is documented at least as far back as November 2016, when HortiDaily reported that Hoogendoorn’s parent company, Batenburg Techniek N.V., had bought the Zeist systems integrator Bellt Consultancy on 31 October that year to widen the automation division in which Hoogendoorn worked.

Batenburg itself is much older than its greenhouse subsidiary. The group’s own history page traces its foundation to the early twentieth century and to Piet Batenburg, and describes a path from electrical installer to technology company built through acquisitions and mergers into specialised divisions. Hoogendoorn’s site lists the other members of the group in its top menu, among them Batenburg Beenen, Bellt, JB Systems and the grower data platform LetsGrow.com.

The company sets out its mission in three words — connect, innovate, grow — and writes its product names in capitals, as with IIVO and TUCO. Its managing director, in a quote on the company’s own page, says the aim is to use data and technology to unlock the full potential of horticulture.

For a design guide, Hoogendoorn shows how a maker of control boxes can build a brand around the screen a grower reads every day rather than around the hardware behind it. Compare Priva, another Westland maker of climate computers, and Ridder, which added climate computers through HortiMaX. For this guide we use a glasshouse green, a pale mist and a rust accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hoogendoorn’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.