Nedato Pool Result for 2025 Comes In at €3.58 per 100 kg — Some Growers Face Advance Repayment
Dutch potato cooperative Nedato has reported a 2025 pool result of €3.58 per 100 kg to its members — a figure reflecting fry-variety pools that sat at zero and briefly negative prices, with the grower advance cut from €2 to €1 and some members facing repayment of advances already received.
Nedato, the Dutch potato trading cooperative, has communicated its pool result for the 2025 season to members: €3.58 per 100 kg, according to a report by Boerenbusiness based on the cooperative’s letter to growers dated 2 October.
The figure lays bare how brutal the 2025 marketing year was for the free-market potato segment in Northwest Europe. Within the cooperative’s pools, French fry varieties stood at a €0 price level for a period and short-term prices even turned negative, the letter indicates. The cooperative’s advance payment to growers was cut from €2 to €1 per 100 kg during the season, and part of the membership now faces a theoretical obligation to repay advances already received — money the cooperative has not yet reclaimed, according to the report.
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The structured contracts offered partial shelter. Under Nedato’s Flex construction, growers with a fixed contract element received €25.67 per 100 kg — above the cost price, according to the cooperative’s accounting — while the “click” (market-linked) element settled at €7.50 per 100 kg. The letter attributes the weak click outcome partly to the disappearance of the futures market, which had previously served as the reference and hedging mechanism for that contract type.
The €3.58 pool result sits at the extreme low end of recent cooperative history and illustrates the depth of the Northwest European potato crisis in the 2025 season: a massive processing-variety surplus, fry processors with full cold stores, and free prices that collapsed below €5 per 100 kg in the trough. Our separate coverage this week shows free-buy prices for Fontane still stuck around €20 per 100 kg in Belgium and France in the new season — historically low for October — while contract prices for the new crop have come down roughly 25% year on year.
Nedato declined to comment publicly on the figures, telling Boerenbusiness it communicates “only with our growers” on the matter. The numbers themselves were disclosed by the cooperative in its own letter to members, which is the basis of this report.
The repayment question now hangs over the membership relationship. A cooperative reclaiming advances from its own growers — even where contracts allow it — is a step with obvious tension, and the letter indicates no reclaim has been executed so far. How Nedato handles that in the coming months, against a new season that is also opening with depressed prices, will shape grower decisions on whether to deliver into cooperative pools or seek alternative outlets for the 2026 crop.
The case also feeds a wider Northwest European debate about risk-sharing in the potato chain. Cooperatives exist precisely to buffer their members against market extremes, but the 2025 season exposed the limits of that buffering when the market itself offers no floor: pools that settle at €3.58 per 100 kg against production costs many times higher are not a buffer but a transmission mechanism for the collapse. With the futures market gone as a pricing reference, the letter’s account suggests, one of the instruments that previously let growers and cooperatives hedge the click-contract risk has disappeared — leaving the 2026 season to be negotiated with even fewer risk-management tools than the one that just ended.
