Lettuce: market leader

Rijk Zwaan has a wide choice of lettuce types for glasshouse as well as outdoor cultivation. Apart from butterhead lettuce, iceberg lettuce and batavia lettuce, the range also includes cos lettuce, oakleaf lettuce and curly lettuce. We also turn our attention to various specialities and different colours. With its present range, Rijk Zwaan can rightly call itself market leader in lettuce.



Wide range
Right now, Rijk Zwaan offers a choice of more than 170 lettuce varieties. With this enormous package of lettuce varieties Rijk Zwaan is able to totally satisfy the most diverse wishes and demands from the market and, at the same time, encourage new trends.

Innovate
Rijk Zwaan reacts to trends by, for instance, introducing lettuce varieties with resistance to the green lettuce aphid (Nasonovia ribisnigri). Rijk Zwaan had a world-first with the introduction in 1998 of the two iceberg lettuce varieties VETONAS RZ and FORTUNAS RZ with this so-called Nr resistance. This resistance increases yield reliability and quality, reduces labour costs significantly and means a reduction in the use of crop protection preparations.

Product concepts
More topical trends are found in the area of product concepts. Since the year 2000, some of the concepts Rijk Zwaan has introduced include babyleaf (lettuce leaves harvested at a very young stage), multi-leaf (three different lettuce types together) and Salanova. The slogan for Salanova is ‘One cut, ready!’, i.e. the lettuce separates into individual leaves with just one cut of a knife.