Piece of history
Ad Boekel started growing 10 hectares of horticulture including bulbs, cabbage, potatoes and onions on the Slootgaardweg in Waarland. The products were sold by Ad himself. A few years later, Ad sold the products of growers around him; the beginning of the trade in vegetables.
In order to be able to expand trading activities further, a warehouse with cold stores facilities was built.
The company has started processing cabbage. For this purpose, a cabbage line was purchased and the building was expanded with an extra hall.
A.N Boekel started processing celeriac in 1997. In the Netherlands celeriac is still a relatively small product, but in the Eastern Bloc and surrounding countries, there was a high demand for celeriac. Celeriac was a growing market. Therefore, Boekel started specializing in processing celeriac.
In 2003 the company came entirely under the management of Niels Boekel and was split up into a trading company and a transport company. Edwin Groen joined him in Boekel Transport B.V. that year.
An even broader cooperation with our growers enabled us to offer our products all year round. As a result, we were also able to deliver directly to supermarkets from that moment on.
In 2008 Bas Francis and Joost van Wonderen became co-owners of A.N. Boekel B.V.
With the emergence of new partnerships with growers, processors, transport companies and fellow exporters, the company has grown considerably. The company building on the Slootgaardweg became too small for the size of the company. There was a shortage of space and loading platforms. As a result, waiting times were created, which is not favourable in this trade. Power and data facilities were no longer sufficient and the traffic pressure was too high. There was a need to move.
In 2013, a merger took place between Boekel Transport and Leegwater Transport. Paul, Mike and Niels Leegwater became partners of Niels and Edwin. They have continued by the name Boekel-Leegwater Transport (BLT).
A.N Boekel B.V. outgrew the current company building. On the 29th of February 2016 the first pile was driven at Breekland. Nine months later, on 7 November 2016, the packaging lines at Breekland actually started to run. We tripled in size: from 3700 m2 to 10,500 m2, from 4 to 12 loading platforms and all kinds of modern applications.
From 2019 our energy will be generated by 2,555 solar panels on our roof. This makes us largely self-sufficient in our energy consumption.
