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Royal Avebe & sustainability: the next step towards more value

To build our future tomorrow, we focus on sustainability today.

Shared Value

Royal Avebe embraces the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for long-term value creation. These 17 goals will constitute the sustainable development agenda for Avebe by 2030. Curious to know exactly how we contribute?

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'Every day a little bit better with a smaller footprint: that is our innovative aspiration.'
Peter-Erik YwemaDirector Sustainability

Sustainable Agriculture

The challenge? To consistently cultivate a higher yield of the best quality starch potatoes with fewer crop protection agents and lower greenhouse gas emissions. Together with our members in the Netherlands and Germany, we strive for sustainable agriculture.

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Reducing our ecological footprint

What Avebe does best is extract the maximum value from potatoes. To do this still requires significant energy and water, and produces waste streams. However, we’ve already succeeded in reducing our ecological footprint using new technology, renewable energy, and improving the efficiency of our process. We won’t rest on our laurels. We continue our efforts to improve. Together with our growers, we have committed that by 2023, compared to 2017/2018 we will:

  • Use 10% less water per tonne of potatoes processed
  • Produce 25% less waste streams
  • Achieve 10% more potato starch and protein of one hectare
  • Produce 10% less carbon emissions per tonne of potato starch

Thanks to the continuous development of our radical improvement program, we already have a success story worth sharing.

Potato Trailblazers

You could call us the trendsetters of potatoes: we were plant-based before it was cool. For over a century, we’ve innovated and extracted as much value from the potatoes as possible, from starch to protein. Potato starch-based solutions provide sustainable alternatives to fossil-based products for markets. Plant-based proteins result in far smaller carbon, water, and land use footprint than animal proteins. Don’t be surprised when we continue to lead the way over the next century.

Sustainable Society

Avebe has been around for over a 100 years, and has operated as a cooperative from the start. Thanks to this history, we are fully rooted in the local environment. We have developed together with our farmers, their supplies, our employees, and all our partners, reaching our current innovative operation. We are in constant dialogue with our local, national and the European government – along with NGOs – to benchmark our strategy and performance. We proactively anticipate new trends in the market and adjust our policy accordingly. The dialogue continues as we share all our progress, goals, and objectives in our Integrated annual report 2021/2022.

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'Sustainability is the core of who we are. By 2030, we will reduce our C02 emissions by at least 50% in accordance with the goals set by the EU as well as our own ideals. We always focus on the right balance between sustainability and the income of our members.'
Rob van LaerhovenCFO