The president of an international company that specializes in potato and onion storage technology said the decision to locate the company’s U.S. headquarters in Boise, Idaho, was easy.
Tolsma Storage Technology officials spent a lot of time looking for the ideal location in North America to expand the company’s operations, and ultimately chose Boise, said president and CEO Pieter Wesseling.
“Idaho being potato country in the United States and us being in the potato business, at the end it was an easy choice,” he said following an official opening ceremony July 1.
Tolsma, a 75-year-old company based in Holland, produces technology and equipment that controls and regulates the climate in potato and onion storage facilities. The company’s Boise headquarters is next to the Idaho/eastern Oregon onion-growing region, the largest in the nation by volume.
The company’s chief commercial officer recently moved his family to Boise.
Tolsma recently expanded into the U.S. market and is already producing some equipment at manufacturing facilities in Idaho at Nampa and Idaho Falls.
Wesseling said the company has an ambitious growth strategy and plans within the next few years to build a new manufacturing facility in Boise that will employ about 100 people.
“We want to double sales in the next five years, and that’s feasible,” he said. “The market is there.”
According to a Tolsma news release, the company has 500 clients in Idaho, Oregon and Washington.
Rep. John Vander Woude, a Republican farmer and retired dairyman from Nampa, said those economic successes show how valuable agriculture continues to be to the state. A decade ago, “Everybody was thinking technology is the next big wave (in Idaho), but agriculture is the one that keeps on going,” he said. “To me, the stability of Idaho’s economy is that the ag economy still goes even when there’s a downturn in prices.”
Source: Herald and News