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LOCAL MANUFACTURING
From zero to
grease trap hero
Established in 2008 as a trap and pipe cleaning company,
Grease Traps has powered its way into this niche, fat-filled
industry and has become a brand to be reckoned with.
By Benjamin Brits | All images Grease Traps
Grease Traps strives to
give a corporate service
with a personal touch.
Grease Traps founder and national sales director
Hermann Vorster, looks back to when the company
was started, taking us through his trials and
tribulations of establishing a manufacturing
business that today rivals companies that have been
dominating the industry for decades. When he was 13, Vorster recalls, before his father passed
away that year, all he wanted to do was go surfing
and mess around – work was not on his to-do list.
Nevertheless, his father’s words stuck with him and at
17, having dropped out of school, he took up his father’s
advice and pursued grease trap cleaning.
IN THE BEGINNING
Vorster, a humble yet confident man, says the idea of
grease trap cleaning was inherited from his father, André,
who was one of the first people to ever clean a grease
trap in South Africa in 1995. A letter of approval from a
large chain store was granted allowing his father to go
through and clean all of the stores’ grease traps. In the
process, his father saw that there was a potential market
for a business that no one had explored. “I got into my bakkie, that was almost falling apart – it
literally had no floor boards and I had to start it with a
spoon – and I started off in Boksburg, knocking on the
chain stores’ doors, selling the service of checking lines
and cleaning grease traps.
Vorster remembers his father kept on stressing to him
that he must keep on cleaning grease traps.
July 2019 Volume 25 I Number 5
“At this time there wasn’t any legislation yet whereby you
had to have a grease trap in place, never mind cleaned. It
was purely at the owner’s discretion to clean or not. The
few owners or managers who understood the negative
effect that fats, oils and grease (FOG) waste had on the
environment would let us in because FOG waste is one of
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