A customer reports to the counter and for a moment Rick Fransens takes his eyes off the cappuccino he’s making. “I’ll be right with you.” He’s used to multitasking. As the owner of White Label, a café located on Zonneplein in Noord, he does everything he can himself. It’s a great job – especially if, like the Franssens, you prefer to work with local and organic produce.

He would prefer to choose all the suppliers himself, but this is not possible. “You are also here on Earth. It is good to trust someone who can maintain this connection.”

Green growth

That’s why he’s been working with Chef Centraal for years, a supplier that sells food and drinks from the region to Amsterdam’s catering industry. Founder Karel Raymakers sees his customer base growing every week. “We are doing well. We have 200 customers and 40 to 50 suppliers.” Its sales volume is estimated at 45 thousand euros per week, 50 percent higher than last year. “And there are still many opportunities,” Raymakers smiles proudly.

Rabobank says these opportunities are being exploited more and more. It is estimated that the amount of food produced locally in the Amsterdam region and also sold in that region has doubled since 2020.

Decision makers in the municipality and the province of North Holland will be satisfied with this. According to them, short series are the future. Now, each bite of food travels an average of 30,000 kilometers before it ends up on our plates – also calculations made by Rabobank. 50% of our food and drinks come from abroad.

It moves

This has to change, says Kees-Willem Rademakers. “During Corona we suddenly saw that our food distribution is not as strong as we thought.” As a researcher at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, he focuses on food logistics. “The way we look at food and health is changing a lot. Our entire diet is changing.”

In this regard, the milk used by Francine is an excellent example. It comes from an organic farm in Weesp and is processed in a factory near Amstelveen. Total distance traveled from cow to cappuccino: 66 km.

Short chain, high price

Oddly enough, the short series is still very expensive. Francine’s organic cappuccino costs four euros. Large producers in a longer food chain focus on cost efficiency down to the last detail. As a result, you often pay less at many cafes.

But this low price is misleading, according to Readmakers. “The costs the product has to the environment, climate, our health and fair employment are not included.” If that happens, such a “regular” cappuccino will be more expensive than the “green” type.

Expensive milk

According to Martin Verdenius, owner of the MOMA dairy in Amstelveen, large parties must also include these social costs in their prices. “Otherwise we will say later that it cost us the landscape, the meadow birds and the farmers.” Then he said sarcastically: “This is expensive milk.”

Then consumers and producers will automatically switch to organic products – but this is not yet the case, Rademakers believes. “It sounds crazy, but food is very cheap in the Netherlands. On average, 10 percent of our income goes to food, up from 30 percent thirty years ago.” Paying more is not an easy message, but it is an essential message. Otherwise, according to Rademakers, our addiction to cheap food could cost us dearly.