Nov 5, 2017

UPDATED — Dümmen Orange Acquires McHutchison, Vaughan’s Horticulture

On Nov. 1, Dümmen Orange announced that it had acquired the U.S.-based wholesale plant brokers McHutchison and Vaughan’s Horticulture “to fulfill its strategic ambition for enhanced distribution and customer reach.”

Dümmen Orange’s breeding activities and McHutchison and Vaughan’s Horticulture brokerage activities will continue to be managed and operate as autonomous business units.

“The McHutchison and Vaughan’s Horticulture acquisition increases our customer reach, while also facilitating the introduction of new products like calla lilies, phalenopsis and grower solutions,” said Biense Visser, Dümmen Orange’s CEO.

GPN contacted Kate Santos, Dümmen Orange’s operations director to learn more about the acquisition. She said the company “will continue to operate under an open platform of distribution through all of our current broker partners. Each broker partnership will continue to remain important and valuable to us.  We are committed to continuing these relationships in a sustainable and profitable way for the mutual success of all.”

McHutchison and Vaughan’s Horticulture will continue to provide a full service offering to their grower customers by developing their valued third party vendor brokerage relationships.

“Given the breeding and brokerage arms of the business will continue to operate as autonomous units, our grower customer relationships within the breeding arm of our business will continue to operate as they always have,” Santos said.  “We do hope with our increased reach to our grower customers, we will gain even better understanding of their needs so that we can tailor and enhance our offering to them.”

The McHutchison and Vaughan’s Horticulture management team, led by CEO Mike Tizio, welcomes this development and supports this next step in the evolution of both organizations.

“We look forward to the expanded product offering and the technical and marketing resources that Dümmen Orange will offer our team to help grow our business.”

“We see this acquisition as an opportunity to build a sustainable platform for the distribution of our current and more importantly our future floriculture innovations,” Santos said. “We also intend to use this platform to test and innovate new distribution strategies to the market, such as bundling our new innovations with our core traditional offerings in order to establish consistent product value across the marketplace.”

Santos adds, “We do not intend to limit this approach or these new distribution strategies to this acquisition, and once a distribution strategy is proven successful, we will then share this with our other brokerage partners in order for all to benefit.”

According to Santos, the objective of the acquisition “is not to become the largest brokerage company in the industry, nor do we intend to go after existing business where our current brokerage partners support us with.  This acquisition is truly about expanding our scale to further drive the innovations and new product categories we want to bring to the market in a sustainable way.”

“Dümmen Orange is growing its organization to lead in empowering ways, to inspire in new ways and win in bigger ways. The expanded customer reach through the McHutchison and Vaughan’s Horticulture acquisition will Support Dümmen Orange in realizing these objectives,” the company said in a statement.