Germany: Hesse Table-Potato Producer Prices More Than Double Year on Year
The Hesse agricultural office puts conventional table potatoes at €36.75 per 100 kg in week 39, against €17.25 a year earlier — while the only exchange-traded potato hedge in Germany closed in June.
Producer prices for table potatoes in the German state of Hesse have more than doubled compared with a year ago, according to the weekly price table of the Landesbetrieb Landwirtschaft Hessen (LLH), the state agricultural office.
In calendar week 39 (22 September 2026), conventional quality-I table potatoes of the firm-cooking type averaged €36.75 per 100 kg, within a range of €35–39. In the same week of 2025 the average was €17.25, within €14–19. That is an increase of about 113%.
Mainly waxy (predominantly firm-cooking) potatoes averaged €34.75 per 100 kg, in a range of €33–37, against €15.75 a year earlier — a rise of about 121%.
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The German financial portal wallstreet:online, reporting on 21 September, used the Hesse figures to illustrate what it called a potato price shock. It also recalled that the European Energy Exchange (EEX) in Leipzig stopped trading its processing-potato futures contract on 4 June 2026 because of low liquidity. According to the portal, the last settlement price was €1.40 per 100 kg.
That means German growers and processors are facing one of the sharpest price moves in years without an exchange-traded instrument to hedge it. Price risk is now managed only through bilateral contracts between growers and processors or packers.
The wallstreet:online report also cited a figure for the total German harvest. Its origin could not be traced to an official source, and it is not used here. Destatis, the federal statistics office, has not yet published its 2026 estimate.
The price rise follows a season in which drought cut yields unevenly across Germany. potatoes.news has reported on farm results ranging from 3 to 58.5 t/ha (read the report) and on the ECIU’s estimate of German losses (here).
Why it matters
A doubling of table-potato prices in a major consuming state will feed through to retail prices this winter. The closure of the EEX contract just before the spike leaves growers and processors without a market tool to lock in prices, putting more weight on contract terms and on storage decisions.
Photo: Potato harvest in Germany (illustrative). Maja Dumat / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
