Ridder Brand Guidelines: The Ridderkerk-Born Family Firm of Greenhouse Drives and Screens

A contractor’s idea in Ridderkerk.

Ridder began in 1953 with a piece of farm machinery. According to the company, and to a 2023 anniversary report in the trade site HortiDaily, the founder, Frans Nugteren, connected a trench digger to a tractor so that ditches could be dug more quickly, and that idea became the start of the business. The same report says the firm was originally based in Ridderkerk, near Rotterdam — hence the name Ridder.

The move into glasshouses came in the 1960s. HortiDaily reported that in 1967 the company began building reduction motors, the geared units later known as drive systems; Ridder’s own timeline describes them as a strong, smart way to open greenhouse windows and says more than a million of its systems are now in use around the world. In 2015 HortiDaily described the 2011 takeover of HortiMaX as one by Ridder Drive Systems.

The same 2023 report adds a less expected side of the story: the company developed a post-calculation system for its own use, which HortiDaily said is still widely used as an ERP system in the steel and manufacturing industry.

Ridder has stayed in the family. HortiDaily called it a family business in 2015 and a family-owned company in 2023, and in April 2025 the company introduced its chief operating officer, Brigitte Nugteren, as the founder’s granddaughter. Day-to-day leadership is not limited to the family: the chief executive named in the same announcement is Pascal Piepers. The company says it now has more than 350 employees and works in more than 100 countries.

Drives, climate computers, screens and a robot.

For most of its history Ridder made the mechanics of a greenhouse rather than its controls. That changed in October 2011, when the Ridder Group took over the HortiMaX Group of Pijnacker, a supplier of climate computers, water treatment systems and labour registration software. FreshPlaza reported in January 2012 that Ridder planned to reorganise HortiMaX, inject capital and open offices in Canada, the United States, Mexico and Turkey, while keeping its sales and support offices in France and Spain.

The takeover changed the shape of both businesses. In a 2015 interview in HortiDaily, the HortiMaX chief executive said the firm had mainly served the Benelux before Ridder’s arrival, and that new climate and irrigation systems had since been developed for mid- and low-tech glasshouses abroad, with user information printed in the customer’s language. Ridder’s 2023 anniversary report lists branches in Canada, France and the United States among the results. Today the Hortimax name survives as a product: Ridder’s 2025 announcement calls the Hortimax climate computer “the brain of the greenhouse.”

The next step was textiles. In 2015 the company started a new business unit, Ridder Climate Screens, to supply climate screens; Ridder says the aim was to deliver locally produced screening products for managing light and energy. In 2021 it partnered with the start-up MetoMotion, maker of the GRoW robot for harvesting tomatoes, which Ridder says can pick, analyse and box the fruit.

Ridder now groups its range under process automation, drive systems, climate screens, water treatment, labour management and robotics, and sells it for both glass and plastic greenhouses, with a separate line for livestock and crop storage. Its contact page lists Dutch offices in Maasdijk, in the Westland, and Harderwijk, alongside offices abroad including France and Spain. Its 2025 announcement names SmartDrive as its newest drive system.

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.

A shield for a company named after a town.

Ridder has explained its own redesign. On 3 April 2025 the company announced a refreshed brand identity, saying that after nearly seventy-five years it was time for a look that was more future-focused, and that the change went beyond a new logo to a renewed way of working with customers and partners. The new mark is a shield, which the company says stands for teamwork, openness and innovation, with smart solutions at its core. The accompanying line is “Working together for sustainable growth,” and its values are set out in three phrases: connect, stronger together and going the extra mile.

The name itself is Dutch for a knight, and the company took it from Ridderkerk, the town where it started. In the same announcement Brigitte Nugteren said the renewed strategy reflected both the company’s heritage and its future, and that its 350 colleagues and partners in more than 100 countries worked every day on solutions for food production.

The brand also carries the HortiMaX history inside it. HortiMaX was a separate brand with its own offices when Ridder bought it in 2011; Ridder now presents Hortimax as the name of its climate computer, under the one Ridder shield, alongside the drive systems, screens and robotics that it lists on its site.

For a design guide, Ridder shows how a family firm built on gear motors can rebrand around collaboration while keeping a town’s name it has carried since 1953. Compare Hoogendoorn, a Vlaardingen maker of climate computers, and Svensson, the Swedish maker of climate screens. For this guide we use a steel blue-grey, a screen white and an ochre accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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