Huub Sleegers: James Bond's Q of machine building

Anyone who buys carpaccio from a supermarket nowadays can safely assume that the tender meat has been thinly sliced and packaged by a Sleegers Technique BV machine. This was the first machine that Huub Sleegers, from the Dutch town of Vlijmen, designed for his own brand. Today, he is the global market leader in carpaccio lines – and customers know where to find him for other types of machines too.

Background

According to Huub Sleegers, a love of solving problems and developing new techniques is in his genes; his father, who owned a quality meats company, enjoyed a challenge too. Huub Sleegers studied electrical engineering and business administration and then, after working as a teacher for a while, he decided to focus on his own company.

Own company

Around 25 years have passed since then. As a one-man operation, Sleegers mainly produced machines to order – something he still loves doing to this day. “A company has a problem and I devise a solution for it.” In 2007 he launched his own brand and he also started attending international trade fairs. Because his father was a manufacturer of quality meat products, many of his machines were produced for the meat industry. The first machine introduced under his own brand was the carpaccio line for slicing the meat and presenting the slices in a circle on a film. For Vion he built a machine to arrange marinated meat chops in formation: the VI-01. Each new model is given a VI number and the counter has since reached VI-52. 

Substantial growth

As the number of orders and machines grew, so too did the workforce. Sleegers keeps a close eye on his interns to see whether they would make good employees. “For me, it’s important that the person is the best in their field and a good fit with the rest of the team. You have to have a certain passion for your work and truly want to excel at it,” – just like Sleegers Technique BV has been doing for the past 25 years.

www.sleegerstechnique.com