Latest news with #Rotterdam
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
Feyenoord and Brentford do business again: Young English talent moves to De Kuip
As per Voetbal International, Feyenoord have done business with Brentford again, with the Rotterdam side bringing 18-year-old Emeka Peters to De Kuip. Peters, previously a Fulham youth product, has been with Brentford for two years and leaves the club after scoring 14 goals and providing six assists for The Bees' U18 team last season. The London-born Englishman has reportedly signed a contract with Feyenoord until the summer of 2028, where he will join the U19s. 'I'm very honoured to be here. It's a new adventure, of course, in a new country, but I'm eager to make my mark with the U19s. I hope that with my actions I can contribute to the team's success and that I can further develop here as a young player.' On Peters' move, Brentford technical director Lee Dykes said: 'We're really pleased for Emeka – Feyenoord is a fantastic club with a proud history, and this is a great step for him. 'He'd expressed a desire to experience football in a new country, and after conversations with him and his family, we felt this move made a lot of sense for where he is in his development. 'It's also a great reflection of the work that's going on in our academy under Stephen Torpey and his team. Not every player will go on to play for Brentford's first team, and that's something we're honest about. 'What's important is that we support each individual's journey and find the right path for them. For Emeka, that path has led to Feyenoord, and it shows the variety of opportunities available for our young players.' Ties between Brentford and Feyenoord have been particularly tight since this summer. The two clubs had previously done business over Antoni Milambo, who moved to the Premier League for at least 20 million euros. GBeNeFN | Max Bradfield
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
Mourinho's Fenerbahce paired with Feyenoord in Champions League qualifying. Benfica gets Nice
NYON, Switzerland (AP) — José Mourinho will take his Fenerbahce team to Feyenoord in the Champions League third qualifying round after the draw was made Monday. Fenerbahce, which finished runner-up in the Turkish league, will go to Rotterdam for the first leg on Aug. 5 or 6 and host the return in Istanbul on Aug. 12. The winner will advance to a qualifying playoffs round in August with a place in the lucrative 36-team league phase at stake. In other pairings between teams that did not win their domestic league, Benfica will play the first leg at Nice and the winner of the second qualifying round clash between Salzburg and Brann will host Club Brugge in the first leg. Benfica and Salzburg — which plays the first leg against Brann in Norway on Wednesday — have an early start to their European season after returning from the FIFA Club World Cup in the United States. Benfica's season ended June 28, losing to eventual champion Chelsea in the round of 16, and Salzburg played until June 26 in the group stage. Also in the Champions League qualifying section for non-champions, the winner between Rangers and Panathinaikos will advance to play Viktoria Plzen or Servette. Games in the second qualifying round are completed July 30, ___ AP soccer:
Associated Press
2 days ago
- Sport
- Associated Press
Mourinho's Fenerbahce paired with Feyenoord in Champions League qualifying. Benfica gets Nice
NYON, Switzerland (AP) — José Mourinho will take his Fenerbahce team to Feyenoord in the Champions League third qualifying round after the draw was made Monday. Fenerbahce, which finished runner-up in the Turkish league, will go to Rotterdam for the first leg on Aug. 5 or 6 and host the return in Istanbul on Aug. 12. The winner will advance to a qualifying playoffs round in August with a place in the lucrative 36-team league phase at stake. In other pairings between teams that did not win their domestic league, Benfica will play the first leg at Nice and the winner of the second qualifying round clash between Salzburg and Brann will host Club Brugge in the first leg. Benfica and Salzburg — which plays the first leg against Brann in Norway on Wednesday — have an early start to their European season after returning from the FIFA Club World Cup in the United States. Benfica's season ended June 28, losing to eventual champion Chelsea in the round of 16, and Salzburg played until June 26 in the group stage. Also in the Champions League qualifying section for non-champions, the winner between Rangers and Panathinaikos will advance to play Viktoria Plzen or Servette. Games in the second qualifying round are completed July 30, ___ AP soccer:
Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Times
Inside The Blender — Innocent Drinks' factory of the future
You don't normally call your dog Spot when you live in the Netherlands, but the robot dog at the high-tech Innocent smoothie factory in Rotterdam is not your average hound. 'Spot takes measurements like temperature and vibration and has an on-board camera,' said John McGowan, head of supply chain at Innocent. 'If there is a non-standard event, he communicates back.' The small robot, about the size of a terrier, 'replaces the human in many ways', he added. Innocent, which opened a factory called The Blender in Rotterdam in 2021, aims to lead the way in both automation and sustainability. It champions green targets as good business sense and believes that other companies will follow its lead. Its eco-friendly factory in Rotterdam may hold lessons for the wider food industry, which was the focus of a new UK government strategy published last week designed to improve access to healthy food. Ministers also want to develop 'more environmentally sustainable production methods' in the sector, which employs 4.2 million people in the UK. Innocent Drinks was founded in Cambridge in 1998 and bought out by Coca-Cola in 2013, giving it the financial firepower for projects such as The Blender. While at least five other factories are cutting back or moving out of Rotterdam this year, citing high energy costs and new pollution limits, Innocent is ploughing ahead with a strategy to become carbon neutral by 2028. What this means, McGowan said, is building two new wind turbines and expanding its solar farm to meet its growing energy needs. The Netherlands is one of Europe's most enthusiastic adopters of solar power and, no surprise given its historical association with windmills, has welcomed wind turbines. But with this switch to renewables comes a problem that Britain also faces: the Dutch grid is struggling to accommodate peaks of electricity when the wind blows and the sun shines, and some companies have to wait up to ten years for a connection. 'Electricity is a challenge, no doubt,' McGowan said. 'The infrastructure [too], which is unusual, given the developed nature of the Dutch economy. However, it is forcing people to be creative and to be more sustainable in their outlook. Many manufacturing sites today are trying to retro-design: this plant was built, state-of-the-art, as an electrical plant … We're at the cutting edge.' In a £200 million and counting factory where the storage silo holds 250,000 litres of juice ready for blending, being at the cutting edge seems important. But during a good hour of walking around, I did not see a single blade. In fact, you would not even know it was a food factory until the packing room, where little bottles whizz around and the odd reject lands in a bucket. There are apparently more machines than human beings, just 280, and those we see have hair nets and beard guards, well-scrubbed hands and no false nails. Sweden is being served today and instead of British bottles of Innocent's juice-based drinks with labels such as 'strawberries, bananas and apples', we watch 'Apelsinjuice med fruktkott' whipping along, off to the fully automated cold warehouse. The factory has already won Breeam (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) sustainability certification and is aiming to go further, both for ethical reasons and business resilience. 'We're on a journey to complete carbon neutral, so we're making more investments in wind turbines,' McGowan said. 'Hopefully we'll be fully net neutral by at the latest 2028 … completely off the grid. And that's a sustainability goal as much as it is a business goal because we don't want to be in a situation where we're dependent on a government or an infrastructure.' The site needs to run 24/7, he added: 'It's critical to the network, so it cannot come down. If this comes down, we lose millions in business, daily … Business continuity is essential.' The Blender uses water-saving technology to clean pipes with air, and employs a complex system of electric heat pumps. Maeve Lynch, site director, said: 'Electric pumps in themselves are not new technology, but for this application for manufacturing and at this level of temperature and pressure to generate the steam and the pressure that is required to keep the system running, it's quite a challenge. They have failed a number of times and we're probably on our third version now.' Many of the juices come in cold so they need to be defrosted and then made sterile, meaning some parts of the factory are hot and steamy. Some of the heat pumps in the ammonia plant, Robert van der Linden, an engineer said, heat juices to 65 or 90 degrees for the pasteurisation process. As with all of its technology, Innocent works with a partner: in this case, GEA, based in Dusseldorf, a major provider for the drinks industry, which supplied the tech for what it calls 'the world's first carbon-neutral juice factory'. Despite a continuing expansion project, the site is remarkably clean. And there is huge attention to detail: the brooms and other cleaning equipment are colour-coded so that nobody can walk away with a different department's litter picker. The factory is in a beautiful location, looking out to sea, on a 60-hectare business park dubbed the Rotterdam food hub. From here, Innocent serves the 18 countries where it sells its products. It's perfectly located for ingredient shipments: orange juice comes in from Brazil, mangoes from India and strawberries from Spain. The fruit arrives ready pressed — orange juice, apple juice and banana pulp, for instance — to be blended according to the factory recipe. Incoming lorries are sustainable too, McGowan said, pointing out a 50-tonne electric lorry discharging its load after a 42-minute trip from the supplier. 'This whole area is here marked to be a food hub, and we have the ships coming in,' he says. 'So they basically come in from Brazil, and they deposit in very large tankers in a juice facility just at the port. And then we transport by electric truck out here.' Unlike other port companies, Innocent says that it has not had issues with cocaine packed in among bananas — probably harder to do in a vat of juice — and they also do not receive pallets directly. 'The only issue we have, quite frankly and openly, is from time to time, particularly in the UK, we would have migrants on the shipment going into our warehouse, in Tilbury, Essex,' McGowan said. If stowaways get into the cargo, the whole shipment has to be destroyed, he said, to reduce the risk of contamination. 'We can't take the chance and we can't test for everything.' Outside the factory, geese, other birds and wildlife cluster, including a sad-looking seagull sheltering against the outside of a loading bay. 'We've managed to find the right balance between protecting their site versus us,' Lynch said. McGowan agreed: 'We look at the natural environment here. It just makes sense to go solar and in the country of windmills [to have] wind turbines.' Clean power, robot dogs and giant heat pumps: other food producers may go green with envy.
Travel Weekly
4 days ago
- Travel Weekly
Holland America Line reinstates ship tours
Behind-the-scenes ship tours are returning to Holland America Line for the first time since the pandemic. The approximately three-hour tour takes guests to the engine control room, galley, bridge, recycling center, bakery, stage dressing rooms and other parts of the ships otherwise exclusively accessed by the crew and officers. The tours include visits from senior officers, and guests receive a special lanyard, photo collection and certificate. Holland America reintroduced the tours in May on the Rotterdam and Nieuw Statendam and expects to have them available fleetwide by the end of the month. They cost $179 per person.
