The Van den Broeke family has specialised in potatoes for four generations.
The grandparents of Guy and Luc Van den Broeke were potato merchants back in the 1920s.
As from 1950, the family specialised in exporting potatoes from its head office at Olsene, 20 km outside Ghent (Belgium). Ten years later, the family expanded the business to include growing potatoes.
In 1977, the firm took a new direction when it bought a potato-processing factory at Leuze-en-Hainaut (Belgium), equipped with three drying cylinders for producing flakes and a small production line for frozen chips.
n 1978, the official manufacturing business commenced, when the public company Gastropom was set up on 22 March (predecessor of the public company Van den Broeke – Lutosa).
In 1981, the company expanded the product range and thereby included a production line for frozen potato specialities at its Leuze factory. In the same year the company launched the Lutosa brand onto the Belgian and European markets.
In 1988, Guy and Luc Van den Broeke, who currently head the Van den Broeke group – Lutosa, took over the public company Primeur, which was previously a frozen vegetable production site. They converted it into a manufacturing unit for the production of frozen precooked chips and potato flakes.
In 1998, in response to growing market demand, they extended the product range to include chilled chips The public company Vanelo was built on the same site as Primeur at St. Eloois-Vijve (Belgium).
