Fresh Forward on the E-Brida DataWareHouse

What does it take to help the breeder find his way even better in ever-increasing amounts of data? With that question, we went to visit Johan Willemsen of Fresh Forward ”Managing and quickly interpreting data is an absolute must and the Datawarehouse helps us do that.”

Fresh Forward is a breeding company with over 25 employees located in Huissen. The company focuses on the breeding of Strawberries and since a few years also apples. There are good ties with the Wageningen University & Research Centre.

Johan Willemsen has worked at Fresh Forward for almost four years as a Bioinformatician and supports the breeding team by performing data analyses. He is also responsible for the design and analysis of molecular markers. He continuously needs a huge amount of data to make the right decisions for the intensive breeding process of “his” strawberries and apples.

There is a lot of remodeling going on at Fresh Forward’s new facility. And so Johan takes us straight into the greenhouses. Johan turns out to be an enthusiastic storyteller with heart for his profession! Many tests are carried out with the various seedlings and selections and the amount of data recorded is enormous. The control of these trials is done from E-Brida. And since eighteen months, E-Brida’s Datawarehouse has also been used to report trial data to the breeder”.

Johan is an enthusiastic user of the Datawarehouse. It appears to play a central role in the selection process. With the many trials in the greenhouse and in Spain scoring for many traits, a large amount of essential trial data is constantly becoming available. “Although the breeding process will always be human work, managing and quickly interpreting data is an absolute must,” Johan continues.