Chip wholesaler or cash-and-carry?

Anyone running a snack bar or chip shop buys from several places. For the chips themselves you face a choice: do you pick them up at a large catering wholesaler or cash-and-carry, or do you buy from a chip wholesaler that focuses only on chips and potatoes? Both have their place. This page explains where the difference lies, so you can make a choice that suits your menu, your kitchen and your customers.

1. What a cash-and-carry offers

A cash-and-carry or large catering wholesaler is built for breadth. Under one roof you will find snacks, sauces, frying fat, packaging, cleaning products and frozen chips in every kind of cut. You drive there yourself or have an order delivered on a fixed route. For a snack bar, that convenience is the big advantage: one trip and your whole stock is topped up again.

The downside lies in the same place. Chips are one of thousands of products there. The potato comes from a large industrial stream, often frozen and pre-fried, and you usually have no idea who grew it. Questions about the variety, about how the chips behave when the season changes or about your frying fat end up with a salesperson who knows a little about everything.

2. What a specialist chip wholesaler does differently

A chip wholesaler that supplies straight from the grower turns this around. The range is narrow, the knowledge is deep. At Friet van Beus the chips come from potatoes the family grows on its own farm in Zeewolde. They are scraped and cut on Tuesday and Friday mornings, vacuum packed in 10 kg bags and then delivered to you by regular drivers. Nothing is added and the chips are not pre-fried, so you decide how they come out of your fryer. You can see the full range under fresh chips wholesale.

Because only home-grown potatoes are processed, you know what you are getting. From September to July that is Agria, and only in August, for a few weeks, it is Frieslander. As a result there is hardly any difference in quality through the year, something that is harder to maintain with a product sourced from changing batches. How the rhythm of cutting and delivery works is explained under delivery of fresh chips.

3. Combining the two is perfectly normal

In practice many owners do not choose one or the other. Snacks, sauces and trays come from the cash-and-carry, the chips come from a specialist. That makes sense: for most businesses chips are the product that crosses the counter most often and the one customers judge them on. Make the difference there and you will notice it in the reactions at the counter.

If you are still weighing up fresh against frozen chips, the comparison in fresh or frozen chips will help. It explains what each option means for flavour, working method and storage in your kitchen.

4. What to look for in a chip wholesaler

Whichever way you go, ask every chip wholesaler the same questions. Which potato are the chips made from, and is it the same variety throughout the year? When are they cut, and when do they arrive in your cold room? Is there someone you can call when the chips behave differently in the fryer than you are used to? And will the supplier help you think it through when you want to adjust your frying routine or your frying fat?

If you supply other businesses yourself, different arrangements apply; see potatoes for wholesalers. For snack bars and chip shops, our approach is set out on fresh chips for snack bars. Would you like to know what fresh chips from our own fields could mean for your business? Call or message Thijs on 06 23972300, or send us a request. You are also welcome to visit the farm in Zeewolde.

Frequently asked questions