Visser Brand Guidelines: The Dutch Family Machine Maker Behind AutoStix, Now Viscon

A family trade that changed crops.

Visser was a Dutch family maker of machines for horticulture. Its history is told today by the Viscon Group of ’s-Gravendeel, south of Rotterdam, which says it is run by the same family. The group says it was established in 1927 by Jan Visser, great-grandfather of the present owners, and that the family business began in the flax trade, producing the soft fibre used for linen.

In the group’s account, the flax business came to an end in 1967, and the next generation of the family began buying and selling equipment for the horticultural industry. As the Dutch greenhouse sector grew and diversified, growers wanted machinery made to measure, and the Vissers began designing and building their own. The trade paper HortiDaily confirmed the date in May 2014, describing Visser I.T.E. as a family company that had been active in horticulture since 1967 and on the world market for more than forty years.

By 2023, when Viscon described the business, Visser Horti Systems stood for young-plant automation: machines for the start of a plant’s life, where seeds are sown, trays and pots filled and cuttings planted before plants go out to growers. Viscon says the success of those designs then took the family into other agriculture and food sectors, from fresh produce to poultry and food logistics.

AutoStix and the open strip.

The product most associated with the Visser name in its later years was AutoStix, a system for planting rooted cuttings by machine. HortiDaily reported in June 2017 that Visser Horti Systems would launch AutoStix for the world market at its open days that month, and that the horticultural company Ball would be the system’s exclusive owner in the United States. Visser said US trials had already stuck more than five million cuttings automatically at rooting stations.

The idea rested on a strip. Cuttings taken from mother plants are stuck straight into a biodegradable strip of cells — one version held 51 cuttings and another 34, according to the 2017 report — and shipped to the nursery in that form. There the AutoStix machine cuts off each cell and plants it, cell and cutting together, into a plug, pot or tray, where the strip breaks down over time. Visser described the transplanter and the strip and tray as patented, and said that once trials were finished the system would be opened up as an “open source” standard for the industry.

The range widened. In June 2019 HortiDaily reported that Visser was adding a three-gripper machine and a six-gripper machine combined with a pot filler to the original six-gripper model, in sizes from 4.8 to 6.0 metres, under names such as AutoStix 3GT and 6GP, with a further three-gripper machine linked directly to a pot filler in development.

Around the machines, the 2014 announcement also introduced Visser Supplies, a new company in the group that supplied specially designed product carriers for growers’ concepts. Viscon’s plant-technology catalogue today lists seeding solutions, filling and dibbling, tray handling and greenhouse intralogistics among its young-plant lines.

Builders under glass and film.

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.

From Visser I.T.E. to Viscon Plant Technology.

The Visser name changed twice before it was retired. In May 2014, HortiDaily reported, Visser I.T.E. took the new name Visser Horti Systems and became part of the Viscon Group, which then specialised in handling systems for agriculture and food. The company said the move gave it access to a larger research department and to Viscon’s experience in logistics and robotics. The announcement also set out a design programme: existing products would be made more modular and would get an industrial design and “even a new product colour.” Its mission line was “Improving & Innovating Horticulture.”

In January 2023 Viscon announced that Visser Horti Systems, its tissue-culture laboratory business ViVi and its product-development unit Viscon Aimfresh would join forces as Viscon Plant Technology, and that “the Visser name is now changing” in pursuit of what the group called “One Viscon.” The new name was presented at the IPM trade fair in Essen and at Fruit Logistica in Berlin. Viscon said the family business had passed to a new generation in 2019, when an outside shareholder also joined. Viscon’s chief strategy officer, Charlotte Langerak-Visser, told HortiDaily that the division was moving “from hardware to more software” and “from machine building to industrial technology.” The old Visser web address now forwards to Viscon’s plant-technology pages, so Visser no longer trades under its own name.

Viscon describes itself today as a family business run by the fourth generation, with factories that include a manufacturing site in Poland. Its plant-technology division, the successor to Visser, now sells automation for tissue culture, somatic embryos and young plants, alongside climate chambers and growing consumables.

For a design guide, Visser shows how a family name can give way to a group brand while the products and the people stay put. Compare Priva, another Dutch family-owned horticultural technology company, and Certhon, a Westland greenhouse builder. For this guide we use a machine blue, a tray grey and a seed gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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