Chip Valley

 Frozen chips, long a staple of the British diet, are enjoying a spectacular boom in France, where potato fields are becoming a valuable investment.

In the northern French countryside, where three quarters of the nation's potatoes are produced, farmers are ripping up other crops to plant them and big corporations are building factories worth hundreds of millions of euros to transform them into frozen chips.

The Potato Gatherers
George William Russell  (1867-1935)
Photo Credit: Armagh County Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] 

Tensions are rising over claims that Dutch and Belgian farmers are ruining the french landscape by removing hedgerows and meadows to plant potatoes in the area now known as La Vallee de la Frite. (Chip Valley)

The transformation is being driven by an insatiable French appetite for chips, accompanied by a dislike of the chores involved in making them.

"Young generations no longer peel much," Ward Claerbout, legal and external affairs director at Agristo, a Belgian frozen chip company, told Les Echos, a financial daily.

The trend is global. The world market for frozen potato products is expected to grow from $7.27 billion in 2023 to $89.51 billion in 2029, according to the Potato Business website.

Industrial food was long considered unworthy of the land of gastronomy. Now French supermarkets are full of frozen French fries but also thick-cut, British-style chips...

McCain, the Canadian group, is spending 300 million euros to improve its frozen potato production facilities in Chip Valley. It plans a 1.4 km-long production line. Potato production has risen by 21 per cent in France over the past decade and the area given over to the crop has grown by 7 per cent last year alone...

A Girl Peeling Potatoes
Lucien Gerard (1852-1935)
Photo Credit: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum [CC BY-NC-ND]

In Chip Valley, fields worth 15,000 euros a hectare three years ago are exchanging hands for up to 25,000 euros. But not everyone is happy. Many of the purchasers are Belgian and Dutch farmers who are unable to exploit the potato boom in their home countries because available land is scarce.

Their arrival has angered some locals. In the Avesnois area near the Belgian border, for instance, meadows where cows grazed and fields where used to grow have disappeared as potato production has more than doubled since 2010.

"That represents damage for our landscape and a risk linked to pesticides," Sylvain Oxoby, mayor of the village of Ohain, said.

(Adam Sage, The Times, 2025)

Isn't it usually the case that one man's loss is another man's gain? And below, a somewhat over zealous response in an editorial in the same newspaper

The last few decades have represented a fighting retreat for French gastronomy, a gradual yielding to the culinary barbarians at the gate. In 2000 a farmer in France's southwest was elevated to cult status after attacking a new, invasive branch of McDonald's (his gastro-patriotism earned him three months in jail)...

And now comes a new invader, battering at the walls of that last citadel of French cooking, the evening family meal:  British-style, thick-cut chips...

So strong is the market for this Anglo-Saxon interloper that the hedges and meadows of France's most northerly region are being torn up to accommodate additional potato fields...

This is a victory worth crowing about. The British have long understood that the scrawny French fry (it was probably invented in Flanders sometime in the late 17th or early 18th centuries) is no match for the classic thick-cut in taste, texture or nutritional value. Finally, even the chippy French have woken up to the fact. Farewell to steak frites, hello to poisson et chips et puree de petits pois.