Polish mushroom production solutions specialist Champion has spend the last year helping leading growers implement modern growing systems.
For Poland-based mushroom production solutions specialist Champion, one of the highlights of the past 12 months has been the construction of what the company describes as “Europe’s most modern mushroom distribution centre” for leading Polish mushroom producers’ group Grzybek Łosicki, which brings together the production of more than 30 mushroom farms. Using innovations in buildings and technological systems, Champion says it has been able to reduce energy costs essential for both heating and cooling of growing rooms for Grzybek Łosick and other major mushroom growers.
As the company’s export director, Tadeusz Raginiak, outlines, Champion is a vibrant and rapidly growing company that has many years of experience in the Polish mushroom industry together with an experienced technical staff and managers.
“Thanks to the excellent knowledge of the market, the company offers construction and equipment for modern mushroom farms, which has resulted in the implementation of more than 240 projects in Poland and 15 abroad,” he says.
In essence, Mr Raginiak says Champion offers complex solutions for the design, construction, equipment and technological systems dedicated to modern mushroom farms irrespective of weather conditions and global region. The company’s principal products and services include mushroom shelving, packing lorries, air handling units and climate control systems, automatic watering systems, cold stores and cooling water installations, specialist lighting, plus growing nets and accessories.
Of these, Mr Raginiak says that both the automatic watering system and the air handling units are relatively new product developments for Champion.
The first of these products, the automatic watering system, is, he says, a “state-of-the-art solution” for the for mushroom growing industry, which “reduces the cost of irrigation, one of the most essential activities, and improves its efficiency”.
Air handling units, which are designed for heat reclaim, are, claims Mr Raginiak, “an unmatched solution on the market”, which use energy recycled from heat exchangers.
“Energy costs are a substantial feature in all expenditure connected with running a mushroom farm, so therefore solutions that offer energy saving solutions are very important for mushroom producers,” he explains.
In terms of the mushroom sector as a whole, Mr Raginiak says there have been three important trends that have defined the direction of the development of the Polish sector over the past 12 months. These, he says, can be described as the development of professional mushroom growing through the mechanisation of particular stages of cultivation, the optimisation of production costs through modernised buildings and the use of cutting edge technological systems.
All of which, says Mr Raginiak, are helping to “reduce energy costs and improve product quality” for Poland’s mushroom sector.
Given the ongoing economic recession, which has affected many areas of life in Poland, it would perhaps not be too much to expect that the consumption and sales of mushrooms in the country have fallen to some extent, but Mr Raginiak says it is still “too early” to say whether the sector has been affected.
“On one hand, Poland has suffered from the global crisis as with many other countries, but on the other hand, we are the society that is becoming richer year by year irrespective of circumstances, so far,” he says. “Mushrooms are, above all, a luxury product in Poland that are being bought more often and national consumption rate is around average, especially given the fact that mushroom consumption rate per capita in Poland is a half less than in other EU countries.
“So even in the future it will be difficult to estimate precisely what was the influence of global crisis on mushroom consumption, but we think it will have been rather trifling.”
Looking ahead to the next 12 months, Mr Raginiak says that Champion favours following “the Japanese business model”, which he says is which is calculated with the long future, even for the next generation, in mind.
“We would like to build our position consistently in the global mushroom industry, increasing awareness through the vast experience that we have gained in Poland and 15 other countries while implementing modern farms within Poland, Europe and beyond its borders,” he says.
Mr Raginiak adds that Champion also has plans to launch a broad range of new products not available in its offer so far, although he stresses that it is too early to go into exact details at the present time.
This article first appeared in the September 2010 issue of Eurofruit Magazine and is reproduced with kind permission of the publisher.
