Since February 2015 the company is managed by Krisztián István, who worked in the top management of more large food ingredients companies in the past 20 years. He participated in the planning and construction of several highlighted, €100m size projects and greenfield investments in the past 10 years in the industries of processing agricultural products and manufacturing starch- and sweeteners.
Utilizing wide experiences, Gálffy and Partner Ltd. started research & development activity, mainly in the area of developing processing technologies for agricultural products and herbs.
The rising of the European herb processing industry would present excellent alternative for the small and medium-sized European agricultural producers, who could substitute in larger areas their mono-cultural (wheat-corn-sunflower-rapeseed based) production – which are exhausting the soil to a great extent – with more value-added and larger income generating plants. Moreover, they would be able to process themselves part of their own output thereby producing new, higher value added products and entering new markets.
As a result, they could decrease their dependence on the grain trading industry, which went through significant consolidation in past decades in Hungary and Europe. Grain traders buy large volumes and utilize their extreme purchasing power to largely depress farmer prices, against which small farmers are absolutely powerless.
The environmental impacts are also important, since the mono-cultural large scale farming can only be maintained by the application of huge volume of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, of which heavily detrimental health effects have been becoming widespread knowledge recently. Moreover, the mono-cultural farming has become seriously dependent on the GMO-seed producing industry in the past decades, where the longtime health impacts are scientifically unclear and very dangerous according to independent Environmental Agencies (Greenpeace).
We plan to erect a demo plant to develop the technology package, where we make the test production using different herb raw materials and the new equipment and process steps can be experimented. At the new Balatonkenese premises of Gálffy and Partner Ltd. the existing industrial buildings can be made suitable to accommodate the demo plant equipment and execute the experimental process.
Proper energy and utilities network connecting points exist (power, natural gas, water, drain and compressed air). The site is well situated for logistics as well, it lays next to a busy main road and holds few warehouses, and sufficient loading and goods handling machinery.
It also very closely located to Fejér County, that is considered as one of the largest and best quality agricultural area in the country.
