December the 28th, 2020 – One Varazdin County-based company boasts one of the youngest Croatian company directors, and has even managed to be awarded significant amounts of European Union (EU) cash for its production of popular plant products.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Marija Crnjak writes, one of the youngest directors in Croatia, 28-year-old Marko Cerjan, the director of CER-CO from Biljevac in Varazdin County, which produces and processes industrial hemp, presented a project to expand business and build new plants this week, worth a total of 5.3 million kuna
The aforementioned is an EU project which involves the production and commercialisation of innovative products from this Varazdin County company, from CBD oils to cosmetics and various teas, with the introduction of new plant cultures within the range. The investment will increase the already significant export potential of this impressive company and enable new employment, as well as the strengthening of added value when it comes to doing business.
“With the realisation of the project that should be completed in the spring, we want to position ourselves as a white-label company that will provide services to other related companies,” said Marko Cerjan, who received an EU funds based grant in the amount of almost two million kuna.
In order to obtain such a grant, this Varazdin County company needed to explain in great detail the benefits of investing in ones health and overall quality of life.
The general goal of the project was to enable investments in the implementation of new solutions, innovative products from SMEs in S3 areas through investments in process innovation and business organisation. The purpose and specific goal of the project was to support the investments of CER-CO in the production and commercialisation of innovative products which are new to the market and will be able to be applied and classified in the S3 thematic priority area called “Health and quality of life”.
Currently, this Varazdin County company processes only seeds, stems and flowers, while the implementation of the previously mentioned EU project will see it carry out an additional production process that includes the phase of oil pressing, the production of protein, industrial hemp flour, CBD oil and even cosmetics.
The implementation of the CER-CO project will increase the level of technological readiness and productivity by investing in increasing production capacity in order to effectively meet the needs of existing and potential customers.
As part of that investment, the plan is to purchase equipment for drying raw materials, harvested industrial hemp, separation lines with display, separation and calibration lines, equipment for the automatic filling of bottles, labels, forklifts, packaging machines, and industrial vacuum cleaners.
In addition, a system of Good Agricultural and Collecting Practice (GACP) will be established, and the project envisages the opening of three new work positions. The plan is also to educate the company’s employees to work with new equipment as well as an innovative production process.
“In the new 560 square metre building, there will be a production facility of 250 metres square which will house machines for processing medicinal herbs and oil pressing, and the remaining area will include office space with a conference hall, an inhouse laboratory and a sales area with a range of cosmetics other hemp products available.
Next year, the plan is to invest in both plants and machines for the drying of medicinal plants, with specially regulated temperature and microclimatic conditions, as this is very important in drying plants like hemp as it maintains medicinal properties which include cannabinoids and terpenoids.
CER-CO will be the first entity in all of Varazdin County to provide the otherwise extremely demanding service of drying out medicinal plants, as Marko Cerjan explained, whose company generates as much as 90 percent of its revenues from exports.
The products are exported to a number of EU countries, Poland, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, the Netherlands and other countries, and with this investment they hope for even stronger placement on various foreign markets. Additional employment is also planned, as they hope the pandemic will soon subside with the introduction of the vaccine, so that they can continue production, which has failed this year due to poor market conditions.
They cooperate with numerous subcontractors, in Varazdin County alone they grow 30 hectares of industrial hemp, there’s also a little in Zadar County, and most of their production takes place in Slavonia, where there are larger areas in which to do it, which makes overall production simpler.
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