The story starts a generation earlier. In 1841, an entrepreneur named Willem Albert Scholten established a potato-starch business in Groningen that would grow into KSH (Royal Scholten-Honig), the first Dutch multinational. Scholten and the other private starch barons bought potatoes from Groningen farmers at prices the farmers had no power to negotiate. By the early twentieth century, the growers had had enough. In 1919 they pooled their resources and founded their own starch sales bureau as a cooperative. The premise was simple: if the buyers would not pay fair prices, the farmers would become the buyers. Every farmer-member supplied potatoes, owned a share of the processing, and got paid a fair return when the finished starch sold.

It worked. The cooperative grew through the 1920s and 1930s, surviving the Depression and the German occupation. In 1948 the loose partnership consolidated into a single company and the Avebe brand was born. By 1956 it was producing not just native starch but starch derivatives - modified starches that could thicken at low temperatures, resist freezing, hold moisture in baked goods, glue cardboard, stabilize emulsions. The privately owned firms could no longer compete with a farmer-owned cooperative that controlled its own supply. In 1978, KSH itself went bankrupt. Avebe absorbed a large part of the Scholten company. The wheel had turned a full revolution: the cooperative founded to push back against the multinational had become the multinational, and the original multinational was gone.

Native potato starch is the starting material. From it Avebe pulls amylose and amylopectin, the two carbohydrate fractions that determine how a starch behaves when you cook it. The waxy potato cultivar Eliane, developed by Avebe and grown commercially since 2005, is almost pure amylopectin and produces a starch that is GMO-free, clear when cooked, and exceptionally stable in frozen or chilled foods. Solanic is Avebe's potato-protein business, isolating the proteins that were once waste from the starch process and selling them into plant-based meat alternatives, sports nutrition, and infant formula. The factories process the same tuber Groningen farmers have been pulling out of the ground for generations - but the outputs would have astonished a 1919 board member.

In 2019, on its hundredth birthday, the cooperative was granted the koninklijk - royal - prefix by King Willem-Alexander. The honour goes to Dutch organisations of national importance that have reached a century of continuous activity. The press releases were modest. The farmers, by all accounts, were pleased. A cooperative that started as a defensive alliance of growers against a more powerful buyer had, in a hundred years, become a national institution important enough for the monarch to recognise. The Solynta partnership announced in 2021, focused on developing true hybrid potato breeding for starch varieties, points at where the next century is supposed to come from: faster genetic improvement, less seed potato weight to ship, more resilient crops for a warming climate.

If you drive the N33 south through Veendam in October, you will smell it before you see it: the deep, faintly sweet, faintly sour smell of potatoes being cooked at industrial scale, water steam rising from the cooling towers into a grey Groningen sky. The trucks come in from the fields full and leave empty. The cooperative has 2,000 farmer-members spread across six districts, four in the Netherlands and two in Germany, and during the autumn harvest season the factories run around the clock. Nothing about the operation is photogenic. The buildings are square, the silos are tall, the pipes are insulated, the parking lot is full of working trucks. It is what a hundred-year-old farmers' cooperative looks like when it has done its job well: not impressive in the picturesque sense, just productive, owned by the people who feed it, and very nearly indispensable.