A Leader In Value-Added Salad Vegetables

Dew Crisp started out as a hydroponic farming operation near Johannesburg in the early 1980s and has since grown to become one of South Africa's leading producers of value-added salad products. Glenneis Kriel spoke to one of the company’s co-founders, Michael Kaplan, about the business's journey to success.

- Michael Kaplan

FAST FACTS

Dew Crisp supplies the local market with hydroponically grown, value-added salad products.

The business mitigates risk by producing and sourcing produce from across South Africa.

Dew Crisp has worked with scientists to refine its plant-feeding programmes, ensuring that the plants receive the optimal nutrition in the correct quantities.

Not knowing what to do after finishing his military service back in the 1970s, Michael Kaplan set off to work on a kibbutz in Israel, where he was exposed to banana, dairy and chicken production. From there, he backpacked through Europe, and was particularly impressed by the new technologies that farmers in the Netherlands were using to protect their crops and improve production efficiencies.

Back home in East London in 1978, he made the decision to become a farmer, an option that was met with criticism from family and peers who did not have farming backgrounds.

“My mother, Ethel, was a doctor and my father, Lewis, a lawyer, so they thought I was completely bonkers when I told them I wanted to farm,” recalls Kaplan.

In pursuit of his dream, he wanted to study agriculture at the Elsenburg Agricultural Training Institute in the Western Cape, but entries had already closed by the time he applied. So he began working at what was then the English Trust Company farm in Stellenbosch, thanks to an introduction from his childhood friend, Bruce Glazer, who already worked there.

“It really was a case of being in the right place at the right time, as the English Trust Company was one of the first to introduce farming tunnels in South Africa.