Earlier this year, in one of its horticultural updates, Rabobank showed how the Dutch tomato sector has continued to scale up. Around half of the total tomato acreage is now concentrated within the ten largest growers. Rabobank notes that this trend toward larger operations is also taking place in other greenhouse vegetable crops, as shown in figure 3.
© CBS
Figure 3. Development of the distribution of the cucumber and bell pepper acreage in the Netherlands between the ten companies with the largest acreage and the other companies
According to preliminary 2025 figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), the Dutch sweet pepper area covers 1,631 hectares. In 2015, this was 1,758 hectares. The number of companies growing peppers has also declined, from 246 in 2015 to 203 ten years later.
Data from RaboResearch show that in 2025, the ten largest pepper growers account for roughly 40 percent of the national cultivation area. Together they manage 652 hectares, averaging about 65 hectares per company. The remaining 193 growers work on an average of about 5 hectares of greenhouse area each. In some color segments the concentration is even higher.
Scaling up is also happening in cucumbers, although at a slower pace. Over the past decade, many cucumber growers increased production mainly by adopting lighting systems combined with high-wire cultivation, rather than expanding their greenhouse footprint. Cucumber farms also face the challenge of meeting short-term labor demands. Under the high-wire system, growers essentially need to harvest the entire crop every day during summer, which creates a much sharper labor peak than in tomato and pepper production.
Further scaling in cucumbers is expected to continue, but it depends heavily on advances in automation and robotics for cultivation, harvesting, and sorting. The ten largest cucumber growers now account for about 31 percent of the total area, compared with 23 percent in 2015. In 2025, the Netherlands had 638 hectares of cucumbers, according to CBS, of which 197 hectares were managed by the ten largest companies and 441 hectares by the remaining 172 growers. This means the top ten average just under 20 hectares each, while the other 172 growers average 2.6 hectares. In 2015, the total cucumber area was 545 hectares, with the top ten representing 23 percent of that acreage.
Source: Rabobank
