Forecasting with confidence: How Gardener's Pride turned uncertainty into operational stability

Gardener's Pride is a family-run company in Friesland, the Netherlands, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries. As they supply commercial buyers, the one-to-three week forecast window is critical for staffing, logistics, and sales commitments. This was the hardest to get right for their team. As Marco van Overbeek puts it: "If you're more than 10% off with a week to go, your buyer simply can't do anything with it anymore." Large swings in projected yield created ripple effects: buyers couldn't plan, the team couldn't plan, and every deviation chipped away at the trust that long-term partnerships depend on.

Gardener's Pride chose hexafarms for two reasons: the approach and the organisation. Rather than movable cameras or periodic snapshots, hexafarms uses fixed cameras that continuously photograph the same greenhouse sections from the same vantage point. This builds a true picture of how each section develops week after week. The speed and flexibility with which hexafarms develops as a company was also a deciding factor.

Weekly forecasts consistently land within the 10% margin Marco set as the internal target, this is the threshold below which buyers can actually use the numbers to plan. At four weeks out, the large outliers that once created chaos downstream have effectively disappeared. Planning around harvest peaks, staffing, and logistics now happens with a level of confidence that wasn't possible before, and forecast reliability has strengthened relationships with sales partners.

By replacing manual estimation with fixed-camera monitoring and a data-driven forecasting engine, Gardener's Pride closed the gap between projected and actual yields in the one-to-three week window that matters most commercially. That accuracy cascaded into better workforce scheduling, logistics, and buyer confidence. Now, Gardener's Pride and hexafarms are setting up automated crop registration and pest & disease detection to close the loop between plant development and forecasts. Tracking crop growth and disease pressurte numerically and in real time to spot deviations earlier and make climate and management decisions with more lead time. As Marco describes it: "The crop registration supports the cultivation plan, and ultimately your forecasts. It means you can assess your crop numerically."