Record number of company closures in food industry

In the first half of this year, 310 companies in the food industry closed their doors. The number of closures has never been so high since Statistics Netherlands started measuring the number of company closures in 2007. The bread and pasta industry accounted for most of the industrial food closures. The food industry is just not the front runner; in the first half of this year, only the metal products industry saw more business closures. This is apparent from an analysis of recent CBS data by our editorial staff.

Most closures in first quarter

In the food industry, 175 companies stopped their activities in the first quarter of this year, clearly more than in the second quarter when 135 companies stopped. Compared to the first half of last year, the number of business closures in the food industry rose by 63.2 percent.  In the first half of this year, most companies in the food industry were closed down in the bread and pasta industry: 185 in total. Next in line were the slaughterhouses and meat products industry (each with 20 closures), the fruit and vegetable processing industry and the dairy industry, each with 15 closures in the first six months of this year. In the fish processing industry, the edible oils and fats industry and the flour industry, not a single company closed down in the first half of this year.

More than 2,400 companies in total industry closed down

In the first six months of this year, 2,415 industrial companies called it quits.  With 345 closures (14.3 percent of the total), the metal products industry topped the closure rankings. The food industry followed with 310 closures (12.8 percent). With 280 closures, the furniture industry also accounted for a considerable share of the total (11.6 percent). There were no closures in the petroleum and tobacco industries in this period. The number of closures was also low in the paper industry (10), the pharmaceutical industry (15) and the basic metal industry (15). Compared to the first half of 2021, the number of closures in the manufacturing industry increased by 54.3 percent in 2022.