Duck products to the corners of the world

Near the village of Ermelo in the central part of The Netherlands, the BR-Tomassen duck processing plant is located. Here, ducks are slaughtered, partly processed and shipped to customers across the globe.

That’s not without reason. The plant is one of the best and highly certified in the world, guaranteeing top quality duck products. It is part of a professional, fully integrated Pekin duck business.

The BR-Tomassen business and other duck operations are located nearby the former Zuiderzee shore (Southern Sea) and seaports in The Netherlands.

“These enterprises were mostly founded by fisherman in the time the new polder land was reclaimed from this sea and thus had no income anymore”, says COO and Deputy Managing Director Jeroen IJzerman of BR-Tomassen.

“As a result, these fisherman needed to start with “something new”, which turned out to be duck raising and slaughtering. Some of them also kept ducks for egg production.“

Also the Tomassen (Duck-To) duck company was founded by such an entrepreneur, named Aart Tomassen in the year 1964. In those days he started as a poultry slaughterman. Later his son Gertjan Tomassen took over the company and over the course of years Tomassen expanded his business to the fully integrated operation it is up till today. This includes:

parent stock farms,

a hatchery,

grower farms and

the processing plant.

Also Tomassen owns the “Duck-To Convenience” further processing operation in Uden, The Netherlands and a plant in Kosovo.

In the year 2007 Tomassen went into a strategic alliance with Thai based Bangkok Ranch (BR) Group, a public company, listed at the Bangkok Stock Exchange. Their combined powers opened up opportunities to further improve their mutual businesses and to act on a global scale.

Photo 1. BR-Tomassen duck integration.

BR-Tomassen nowadays works closely with all partners in the chain, allowing the company to maintain quality standards throughout the process, from production up to and including delivery of the end product. Gertjan Tomassen is a major stakeholder in the BR-Group.

OWN FARMS AND HATCHERY

BR-Tomassen imports Pekin parent stock ducklings from Cherry Valley in the UK. “We have good experiences with this breed”, says Jeroen.

“ Incidentally we test another breed as a check. But so far we are satisfied with the Cherry Valley results.

We always search for the best breed. We rear the parent stock on our own farms, after which laying starts at an age of about 26 weeks.

On average we keep by around 50,000 parent stock. The eggs are collected manually on a daily basis.

For that purpose we are using traditional floor based, wooden duck laying nests. These have proven to be the best working, but we are also going to test automatic nests. The females lay about 240 eggs during their productive life.

After checking and stamping:

• The eggs are taken to our own hatchery in which we are using duck hatchers from Pas Reform.
• Also these have proved to work well and hatching results 83%.
• Ducklings hatch at 28 days of incubation after which they are taken to the grower farms.

We have a number of our own grower farms and we hire contract growers in The Netherlands and nearby located in Germany. Altogether there