The greenhouse vegetable market is currently being characterised by high productions. Yet the differences in market situations are significant. From ‘crazy situations’ in Dutch and Belgian tomatoes to cucumbers, which continue to do surprisingly well. Arie Middelburg of consultancy GreenMatch explains the greenhouse vegetable market: “In general, productions will remain high during these weeks. However, I worry about whether we’ll be able to keep quality high in coming weeks because of this incredibly warm and sunny weather.”
“In the large segments of vine and loose tomatoes it’s one big crisis, and that’s been going on for a while now. Unfortunately I’d be willing to say it won’t become a good season anymore because of this longer period of bad prices,” Arie says. “Normally, price rises (and decreasing productions) occur in this month, and we can only hope this will also happen this season, because sales of vine and loose tomatoes can be called plain bad. The holiday period is never good for sales, and besides, productions aren’t just high in the Netherlands and Belgium, but local productions in various other European countries are also increasing.”
For bell peppers, the differences are large per colour. “Most pressure is on red bell peppers. There’s a lot of supply of these, and prices are fairly low. When there are many red bell peppers, the supply of green ones is often relatively lower, and that colour is therefore doing quite nicely. The market for yellow and orange bell peppers is also developing, positively in part thanks to changing demand from the US, for which the larger sizes yield remarkably more than the smaller ones,” Arie continues.
“Last week, the aubergine market was still at a low level, but is now recovering. The area in the Benelux has expanded and productions are high as well, but fortunately this market is now recovering from a slump,” Arie says. The major exception in greenhouse vegetables is cucumber. “These are doing very well. The area hasn’t changed much and productions are good, but there haven’t been any serious highs and lows this season. Due to production shifts there’s now a little less supply, but these shifts are quite spread out nowadays. When the weather is this hot, cucumbers are one of the most popular products for consumption.”