Remond van Dorland, General Manager of Wilmar Edible Oils, has spent his career working in vegetable oil. He got his start with Karlshamns, which was later rebranded AAK. Working in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, Remond got his first managerial role in 1997 with the Dutch branch of Karlshamns before moving to an Italian vegetable oil company where he spent three years, before joining Wilmar.
Ive been working for Wilmar since early 2005, Remond explains. At that time, I was asked to join Kuok Oils and Grains, which was a company that started vegetable oil and sugar trading in the late 1960s. But in 1991, the CEO at that time, Kuok Khoon Hong, decided to set up a company called Wilmar. In 2006, Wilmar and Kuok Oils and Grains merged into Wilmar International Ltd.
Back in 2005, I was asked to help Kuok Oils and Grains to set up some businesses in Europe and we started with our first greenfield project in the harbour of Rotterdam, and it was a 1,000-tonnes-per-day refinery. At that time, for European standards, that was a big refinery because most refineries were 400600 tonnes per day. Together with us, some other companies from Asia came to Europe and started to build similar-size plants, so we changed the whole scene in Europe for tropical vegetable-oil refining. The plant started to commission around the end of 2005 to the start of 2006.