Hippotainer on Wageningen Campus: Growing Food Anywhere

The concept of Hippotainer began while cofounders Jort Maarseveen and Tijmen Blok were doing their Masters at WUR with backgrounds in biology, business, and biosciences. They started to experiment with container farming as “just an idea” to make farming accessible anywhere in the world. Things really escalated quickly, Jort recalls, “before we knew it, we were building our first prototype and even brought it to Ukraine, sold it to a party over there, and trained some local people on how to use our system”. As things really started to grow quickly with this student passion project of Jort and Tijmen, they still had school to think about.

They paused their project to finish their theses. But after graduation, they didn’t know exactly the next step to take in life: find jobs, take a gap year, or more school. But the two couldn’t let go of the unlocked potential of their project and turning their idea into a business seemed like the next step, but how? The problem was that neither knew how exactly to start a business. That all changed when they discovered StartHub, Wageningen’s startup incubator. “There's people at StartHub that know how to start a business and that offer the training and the expertise and everything right there for whoever has a nice idea” explained Jort. After joining a seven-day boot camp at StartHub, Jort and Tijmen came out with a validated business plan and never looked back. “That bootcamp sparked our whole adventure,” says Jort, “that’s when Hippotainer was really born”. Now Hippotainer offers several container-based solutions. Yet they are not most proud of a single product but instead what they are able to offer people; a full solution, making it possible to grow fresh vegetables anywhere.

Why Wageningen Campus?

Right from the first bootcamp at Starthub, Hippotainer has always been close to Wageningen Campus as they later moved onto the StartLife program. Wageningen Campus has provided Hippotainer with an ecosystem full of connections and opportunities. While Hippotainer began with their office off campus they noticed that they were coming to campus several times a week to meet other entrepreneurs, attend Wednesday drinks, or work with interns. “At some point, it just made sense to move closer” Jort explained. Recently Hippotainer moved their office into Plus Ultra II and are enjoying the collaborative atmosphere; “it's really good to learn from each other because everybody has the same struggles in the first phase of starting a business, so it is nice to have a place where you can share and learn”. Additionally, being on campus makes it easy for Hippotainer to find and work with interns, as they have already had 7 interns and look forward to working with more.

Looking Ahead to Collaboration

Hippotainer is excited to collaborate with Wageningen University in the near future to place one of their container systems directly on campus as both a show and tell for visitors and students and R&D hub for testing and research. Hippotainer hopes to continue their collaboration with WUR researchers as well. “The Plant Sciences Group is doing a lot of research with indoor farming, which is super relevant for us,” says Jort. Hippotainer learns from the research findings and integrates the knowledge into their systems, while also providing feedback to the researchers from a practical perspective. “We tried to create this bridge between the results of the research and the real practise because not everything that you research is going to work in practise” Jort explains. As Hippotainer grows on Wageningen Campus, the team invites students, researchers, and fellow entrepreneurs to step inside their container and help shape the future of food.