For every €1 farmers earn, €4 goes to processors, retailers, and restaurants

Farmers produce the food, but everyone else makes the money

EU farmers generated €221.6 billion in gross value added in 2023. Food and beverage processors generated €298.6 billion. Wholesalers, retailers, and restaurants added another €549.2 billion. That is not surprising in itself. Every stage of the food chain adds real value through processing, packaging, transport, and service, and each of those steps has real costs. A loaf of bread should cost more than the wheat that went into it.

The question is whether the balance between stages is still fair. Eurostat's 2025 edition of Key Figures on the European Food Chain suggests it is not. Over the past decade, consumer food prices have risen sharply, retail and processing margins have expanded, and yet farm incomes have only grown because a third of the workforce left the sector. The problem is not that others in the chain earn money. It is that the power imbalance between a fragmented farming sector and a concentrated downstream industry has tilted so far that many farmers cannot cover their costs without public subsidies.

Farmers keep €43 out of every €100 they produce. Where does the rest go?

The EU's agricultural industry produced €531.9 billion in gross output in 2024.

But, for every €100 worth of food that leaves an EU farm, roughly €57 goes straight back out the door to cover intermediate costs, fertilisers, energy, animal feed, seed, and other inputs. Farmers keep about €43. Across the entire EU in 2024, that translated into €228.6 billion in gross value added from €531.9 billion in output, a sum that represents just 1.2% of the EU's GDP. In other words, an industry that feeds 450 million people barely registers in the overall economy.

That matters more in some countries than others. In Greece, agriculture makes up 3.2% of GDP, the highest share in the EU, meaning whole regions depend on farming in ways that Germany or Luxembourg simply do not. Romania (2.5%) and Spain (2.3%) are in a similar position. When farming accounts for that much of a national economy, every euro lost to the value gap ripples through rural communities, local businesses, and household incomes far beyond the farm gate.

Compare that with the downstream stages. EU food and beverage processors, a sector comprising 309,000 enterprises that employ 4.8 million people, generated €299 billion in value added in 2023. The wholesaling, retailing, and food service segment was even larger: 2.7 million enterprises, 17.1 million employees, and €549 billion in value added. Combined, these post-farm stages produced roughly €848 billion in value added, nearly four times what farming itself contributed.

Nobody expects farmers to capture the same value as the entire chain combined. Processing, logistics, and retail all involve significant investment and labour. But the ratio has shifted over time, and not because downstream costs have risen proportionally. When consumer food prices climb 44% in a decade and farm incomes only grow because a third of farmers leave, the gains are clearly not being shared evenly.

Large companies dominate processing, and the gap keeps widening

The food processing sector is not a level playing field. While 95.8% of EU food and beverage processors are micro or small enterprises employing fewer than 50 people, the economic weight sits elsewhere. Large enterprises with 250 or more employees generated 56.8% of all value added in food processing and 65.2% in beverage processing in 2023.

Germany alone accounted for 20.9% of EU food processing value added, followed by France at 15.9%. Foreign-controlled enterprises added another layer of concentration: in 2022, they contributed 26.8% of the value added in EU food and beverage processing while accounting for just 16.5% of employment, a sign of capital-intensive operations generating high returns with fewer workers.

This concentration matters because it determines who has bargaining power and who does not.

Greece is a telling example. Alongside Cyprus, it has one of the EU's most specialised food processing sectors relative to its overall manufacturing base. You might expect that to benefit Greek farmers, but the reality is different. Food processing in Greece employs a large workforce yet generates comparatively little value added. The gap between its share of manufacturing jobs and its share of manufacturing value added was 10.4 percentage points in 2023, one of the widest in the EU. In practical terms, that means many people working long hours in food processing for modest returns.

If processors themselves are operating on thin margins, the farmers supplying them have even less room to operate. And this is not only a Greek problem. Across the EU, when a few large companies control the food supply chain from factory to supermarket shelf, individual farmers cannot negotiate better prices, even when the food they grow ends up costing consumers significantly more at checkout.

Consumer food prices climbed 44% in a decade, but farmers saw little of it

Between 2014 and 2024, EU consumer food prices rose 44.4%, well above the 29.8% increase in overall consumer prices. Part of that increase reflects real cost pressures: energy prices, transport, packaging, and labour all got more expensive across the chain. Higher shelf prices are not automatically a sign that someone is profiting unfairly.

But the data on farm incomes tells a different story. Over a longer timeframe (2009 to 2024), real agricultural factor income per worker in the EU rose 93.6%. That sounds like farmers did well, until you look at the decomposition. Total factor income for the sector grew just 31.1% over those 15 years, while 32.3% of the agricultural workforce left. Income per remaining worker nearly doubled not because the sector earned much more, but because far fewer workers were left to share it.

Household spending on food, beverages, and food services reached €1.93 trillion across the EU in 2023. Of that sum, agriculture's gross value added captured only a fraction. The rest covered processing, logistics, retail margins, and restaurant services. Each of those stages has legitimate costs, but when the farmer's share of the final price keeps shrinking while the total keeps growing, the distribution of value along the chain deserves scrutiny.

Subsidies keep many farms afloat, but the safety net is uneven

Direct EU support payments accounted for 19.1% of agricultural factor income across the EU in 2023. In some countries, that dependency is staggering: Estonian farmers relied on direct payments for 89.5% of their factor income, Latvian farmers for 63.9%, and Lithuanian farmers for 61.4%. At the other end, Dutch farmers drew just 5.5% from subsidies, and Italian farmers 10.5%.

This variation reflects not just differences in farm productivity but in how much value individual food security systems allow farmers to retain. Countries where farming is more diversified or where farmers have stronger market positions, through cooperatives, protected designations of origin, or direct sales, tend to show lower subsidy dependency.

The policy debate around the EU's Common Agricultural Policy continues to grapple with this tension. Subsidies compensate farmers for what the market does not pay, but they do not address why the market pays so little at the farm gate relative to what consumers spend. As long as the power imbalance between fragmented producers and concentrated buyers persists, direct payments function as a transfer from taxpayers to sustain a system that the market alone would not support.

What would a fairer food chain actually look like?

Several EU countries offer glimpses of alternative models. Italy, France and Greece have built extensive systems of protected designations of origin (PDOs) and geographical indications (PGIs). The numbers, as of September 2025, are:

Italy: 585 PDOs
France: 478 PDOs
Greece: 114 PDOs

These schemes let farmers capture more value by linking products to specific regions and quality standards rather than competing purely on price.

Short supply chains and direct-to-consumer sales bypass intermediaries entirely. Farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture allow producers to retain a larger share of the final price. Cooperative models remain powerful tools for aggregating bargaining power, giving farmers collective leverage that individual operators lack.

For suppliers looking to bypass intermediaries, you can list your products on our marketplace and connect directly with buyers. Our price insights tool also tracks real-time market data, so you can negotiate with the numbers on your side.

None of these approaches will single-handedly rebalance the food chain. But the Eurostat data makes one thing clear: when the people who grow the food cannot sustain themselves without public subsidies, that is not just a problem for farmers. It is a structural vulnerability in Europe's food system that affects everyone who eats.