… with partners and employees
There’s one constant amid all this innovative energy: the family atmosphere – despite a workforce now numbering around 800, including seasonal field labourers. Father Willi, 64, mother Marion, 63, and Guido and Thomas, 41 and 36, discuss the business situation every morning over breakfast. The Herrmann sons literally grew up in their parents’ enterprise. ‘They didn’t have a say in the matter,’ senior partner Marion jokes. Today, the four family members divide the work between them: Guido is responsible for organizing the harvest and deploying personnel to the fields. Thomas is in charge of sales and commercial activities. Willi oversees the company’s technological development and Marion is responsible for its finances and personnel.
‘What’s important to us, above all, is our responsibility for our employees and understanding their concerns,’ says Marion. The seasonal workers are lodged in three company-built hotels. A number of love stories have begun there. ‘When couples have formed, we’ve sometimes accompanied them right up to the birth of their children,’ Marion chuckles.
When operations get especially busy, the family join the employees at the conveyor belt and work side by side with them. ‘That’s when you realise how strenuous it is,’ she says. This is surely one reason for the palpably casual, collegial sense of cooperation among the employees and management. Whether it be on the state-of-the-art packaging lines (where almost no one needs a scale to bundle 100 grams: ‘after two days, you’ve got the feel for it’) – or in the field, where women work row by row in small groups, carefully cutting herbs with knives and pre-sorting them. As in the dill field, for example, since the plants here are especially sensitive. No matter the level of mechanisation, sometimes the human factor is indispensable.