Alan Husum

"The food business has a good future perspective for a sustainable company"

Student Agricultural Business Administration, Alan Husum: "I really enjoy growing things, food-wise and business-wise. California is a high agricultural area, I always grew vegetables myself. I have the ambition to start my own company, which needs to be sustainable. The food business has a good future perspective for a sustainable company."

Cultural differences
"I grew up in California and later on moved to Denmark, I found this study online. The class consists of 50% Dutch students  and 50% from all over the world. There are a lot of cultural differences. Everyone brings a different perspective and/ or different opinion to the table. Often this makes the start a bit more difficult, but you also end up with a better project."

Lot of projects
"The first year was even better than expected. We worked on a lot of projects, for instance a project about the beer-branch. We were investigating how big beer brands can compete with the smaller ones. People like drinking quality, with the experience from the small specific beer brands; so for big companies it is hard to compete. The bigger brands need to assure they have the smaller beer taste from the bigger beer brand."

Roses
"Another project was about importing roses from Africa. Here we looked at the complete supply chain and the logistics within. Where do the roses come from; where do we need to send them to; how do we keep them cold; how big needs the farm to be; how many shipman to we need a week. Within this project the sustainability aspect was very important." 

Educational programme
"Since you work with developing countries, you need to make sure people and the planet are respected and treated correctly. Furthermore, working with different cultures asks kindness and respect of each other and to the world and this needs to be in balance with the profit. During our educational programme we learn how to balance these aspects with the example projects and within class."

Innovative drink
"At the moment we work on a project together with Food Technology. We have made up a new innovative drink. A vitamin C tablet which you can drop in a glass of water and then it turns into a soda with bubbles. The Food students are developing the tablet and we are working on how to market this product, including the strategy, action plan, strengths and weaknesses of the product as well as the opportunities and threats form the market. We presented this on the Hogeschool Van Hall Larenstein (HVHL) business fair. For my internship I would like to explore this some more, so I can learn everything I need to know about starting my own business, you never know it may work out! My advice for new students: study hard and don’t forget to relax!"

Learn more?
Information International Business in Food and Flowers