De Heus + Bel Ga — pan-Vietnam rooftop solar across factories, genetics farms, and hatcheries.

The customer and the footprint.

Royal De Heus is a Dutch family-owned animal-nutrition group with feed-mill operations in more than ninety countries. In Vietnam the group has been on the ground for over fifteen years, operating sixteen feed mills nationwide and trading under five brands across the country: De Heus, Windmill, Koudijs, Proconco, and Anco. The Vietnamese business is one of the larger animal-feed operations in the country and the first premix feed mill in Asia is part of the De Heus Vietnam network. Bel Ga is the group's poultry-genetics arm — hatcheries and breeder farms producing day-old chicks and parent stock — operated as a joint venture under De Heus Vietnam's umbrella, with Rick van der Linden as General Director and concurrently Genetics Division Director for De Heus Vietnam.

The combined De Heus + Bel Ga Vietnam footprint covers feed mills, premix plants, hatcheries, and genetics farms — diverse industrial-process and agribusiness facilities scattered across the country's three regions, from the northern highlands to the Mekong Delta. The operating reality on a feed mill is not the operating reality on a hatchery. Feed mills run continuous milling and pelletising loads with significant electrical draw and predictable daytime profiles. Hatcheries run climate-controlled incubation environments with a different load shape — steadier, smaller, but with an absolute reliability requirement that doesn't tolerate downtime. Genetics farms sit somewhere in between. A single cross-portfolio energy intervention had to work for all three.

Royal De Heus's group sustainability programme — Responsible Feeding — runs as a globally-overseen framework with country-level execution. By 2022 the Vietnamese organisation had identified the rooftop area across its facilities as an under-utilised asset that could deliver renewable electricity, support the parent group's net-zero direction, and ease the operational electricity bill at the same time. The internal alternative — own-balance-sheet capex across thirty-plus rooftops — was unattractive. Self-investing in solar across a distributed agribusiness footprint pulls capital away from the operating business. A Zero Capex structure was the obvious fit. The question was who could deliver it across the whole footprint without making the customer manage a different counterparty for every site.

One contractual wrapper across thirty sites in nineteen provinces.

For a multi-site rooftop portfolio at this scale, the engineering is the easy part. Modular rooftop solar PV in Vietnam in 2023 was mature technology. The 200 to 700 kWp typical system size on a feed-mill or hatchery roof was the bread-and-butter of the local C&I solar market. Sub-contractors and EPCs with the relevant experience were available across the country. What was harder was the structure around the engineering.

Three things had to work simultaneously to make a single portfolio agreement possible. First, a Zero Capex commercial structure that worked equally well for a feed mill running continuous heavy electrical draw and a hatchery running steady climate-control loads — without forcing two different contracts. Second, a roll-out logistics plan that could move from province to province without losing momentum, given that grid-connection rules, local-authority approvals, and EVN regional-corporation procedures vary in practice across the three regions. Third, a single counterparty signature on the institutional side: the customer signs once with a developer-operator-financier that can also bring its own institutional capital to the deployment, so De Heus is not chasing thirty separate financing arrangements behind thirty separate contracts.

There was a fifth thing, which doesn't always get captured in the technical or commercial framing of these projects but matters as much as any of them: the procurement and sustainability standards of a Dutch agribusiness MNC. Royal De Heus's headquarters in the Netherlands has a clear set of expectations on supplier ES&HS standards, on the quality of the institutional capital backing a long-term partner, and on the reporting and verification chain that links solar generation back to the group's published sustainability disclosures. Hitting those standards in Phnom Penh is hard; hitting them in nineteen Vietnamese provinces simultaneously is harder. The developer that landed the agreement had to be able to clear Amsterdam, not just Ho Chi Minh City.

The portfolio architecture, the EOLA structure, and the multi-province roll-out.

On 2 March 2023, De Heus, Bel Ga, and Green Roof signed the MoU establishing a partnership for up to 20 MWp of rooftop solar across thirty De Heus and Bel Ga sites in nineteen provinces — the largest single-customer rooftop solar agreement of its kind in Vietnam that year. The signing took place in Ho Chi Minh City, attended by Daniel Stork (Consul General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), Nguyen Do Anh Tuan (Director of the International Cooperation Department at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development), and the senior leadership of all three parties — including Johan van den Ban as CEO of De Heus Vietnam and Rick van der Linden as General Director of Bel Ga and Genetics Division Director of De Heus Vietnam. The MoU's institutional weight reflected the scale of the underlying portfolio commitment.

The portfolio that was actually built and contracted under the MoU framework reached up to 10 MWp deployed across the customer's footprint. The work split across three site archetypes — feed mills, genetics farms, and hatcheries — and across the three Vietnamese regions, from the centre and south where most of the network sits, into the Mekong Delta and southern central coast.

The site-type architecture

The EOLA structure

The portfolio was contracted under Green Roof's standard 20-year Equipment Operating Lease Agreement structure. Under the EOLA, Green Roof finances, designs, builds, and operates the rooftop solar systems on each customer site; the customer takes the energy generated under a long-term lease arrangement, with no upfront capital outlay and the operating-lease fee structured to deliver electricity-bill savings against the customer's prevailing EVN tariff from day one. Operations and maintenance, monitoring, performance guarantee, and end-of-life decommissioning all sit with Green Roof for the lease term. The customer's exposure is operational electricity at a discount, not asset ownership and not capital deployment.

The institutional finance side of the EOLA is what makes the structure work at this scale. CN Green Roof Asia is a joint venture established in 2021 between Climate Fund Managers (CIO — Climate Investor One blended-finance vehicle) and Norfund (the Norwegian government's investment fund for developing countries), specifically established for C&I rooftop solar in Vietnam, Indonesia, and (later) the Philippines. CFM and Norfund equity sits behind the platform; the platform deploys against contracted customer rooftops; the long-term operating lease cash flows from the customer base service the project economics. The structure is an institutional-capital-grade rooftop solar platform — not a one-off project finance, and not balance-sheet capex from the customer.

The multi-province roll-out

Sequencing the deployment across nineteen provinces meant clustering sites by region for EPC mobilisation, navigating the practical differences between EVN Northern Power Corporation (EVNNPC), EVN Central, EVN South, and EVN Saigon procedures for grid-connection registration and self-consumption notification, and managing the time-to-energise across a portfolio where regional approvals don't move at uniform speeds. None of this is glamour work; it is the operational discipline that determines whether a 30-site MoU lands as an actual asset base or stalls as paperwork.

The agribusiness ES&HS envelope

Building solar on agribusiness sites — particularly hatcheries and breeder farms — adds layers to the construction-phase ES&HS envelope that pure industrial sites don't carry. Biosecurity is the headline difference: contractors moving onto a hatchery roof have to clear protocols designed to prevent disease transmission into the breeding stock. Construction sequencing has to respect the production cycles of the underlying business — you cannot hot-roof a hatchery during a brood. CNGRA's IFC-aligned ES&HS framework — itself shaped by CFM and Norfund's institutional standards, audited annually by the investors — provided the discipline to manage that complexity site-by-site, with documented protocols, contractor training, and project-management oversight that the customer's audit chain could verify. That envelope is the same discipline that runs through the Solana Hermosa utility-scale build under the same platform.

What was harder than it looks

Three things mattered more than the engineering:

• Carrying one contract across diverse operating realities. A feed mill, a genetics farm, and a hatchery are different businesses with different load shapes, different reliability requirements, and different on-site working protocols. Building one contractual wrapper that worked for all three — without ten amendments and a dozen side letters — required the EOLA template to be flexible enough to respect the differences while staying simple enough that the customer was not signing thirty bespoke instruments.
• Grid-connection variation across nineteen provinces. The post-FIT2 self-consumption framework in Vietnam in 2023–2024 did not yet have the cleaner Decree 58/2025 + Decree 105/2025 wrapper that came later. Provincial DOIT engagement, EVN regional-corporation registration, and inverter/connection compliance varied in practical execution across the regions. Sequencing a multi-province roll-out under that variability needed a roll-out plan that respected each province's actual procedures, not a generic national template.
• Translating a Dutch agribusiness MNC's group-level sustainability standards into thirty Vietnamese rooftop projects. Royal De Heus's Responsible Feeding programme, group sustainability disclosures, and supplier ES&HS expectations are set in the Netherlands. Hitting those standards in feed mills in Binh Dinh, hatcheries in Long An, and breeder farms across the south required the developer to clear the parent group's audit chain — not just deliver kWh against an EVN tariff. The institutional-capital backing of CNGRA (CFM and Norfund) was the structural answer to that requirement.

What the portfolio delivered, and what it set up after.

The portfolio entered service in stages from late 2023 onwards as individual sites reached completion, with up to 10 MWp built and contracted across the De Heus and Bel Ga footprint under the single MoU framework. The customer transitioned from a balance-sheet electricity exposure to an EOLA-priced operating-lease structure, beginning to draw a meaningful share of its on-site electricity from solar generated on its own rooftops. Royal De Heus's group sustainability programme picked up a verified, scaled, multi-site renewable energy contribution toward Responsible Feeding's climate metrics. CN Green Roof Asia recorded the largest single C&I rooftop solar customer agreement in Vietnam in the year of signing — and a reference deployment that subsequent CNGRA portfolio agreements with other multi-site MNC customers could point to.

Beyond the operational numbers, three things mattered more in the longer arc:

• Vietnam got a working precedent for institutional-capital-grade multi-site rooftop portfolios under one contract. Single-site Zero Capex rooftop solar had been settled commercial structure in Vietnam since around 2019 (Coats Phong Phu was an early reference point). Multi-site MNC portfolios had been talked about often, signed less often, and built out fully even less often. The De Heus + Bel Ga MoU and its delivered build moved the conversation from "could we do this" to "here is what it looks like when done."
• The EOLA structure proved out for an agribusiness MNC, not just industrial manufacturing. Most of the Vietnamese C&I rooftop track record up to 2023 sat in textile, electronics, and conventional manufacturing — large, single-site loads with predictable shapes. Demonstrating that the same EOLA template could be carried across feed mills, genetics farms, and hatcheries broadened the addressable market for institutional-capital-grade rooftop platforms into agribusiness, food processing, and similar distributed multi-site MNC footprints.
• Dutch–Vietnamese commercial diplomacy got a tangible reference point. The MoU signing had the Consul General of the Netherlands and the MARD International Cooperation Director in attendance for a reason: bilateral commercial engagement between the Netherlands and Vietnam has a long history — particularly in agriculture and water management — and a private-sector renewable-energy commitment of this scale, executed against a Dutch MNC's Vietnamese footprint, was a useful public signal that the bilateral commercial agenda was producing concrete outcomes, not just communiqués.

Operational, multi-site, and operated by Green Roof Vietnam under CNGRA.

The De Heus + Bel Ga portfolio is operational, with the contracted sites generating into De Heus and Bel Ga's on-site self-consumption profiles and the EOLA cash flows servicing the platform's project economics. The asset base is owned by CN Green Roof Asia and operated through Green Roof Vietnam, which carries day-to-day O&M, monitoring, performance reporting, and customer relationship management. The customer relationship sits with the Green Roof platform, not with any individual.

Three lessons from the De Heus portfolio that still apply in 2026.

These are the operating heuristics built around the De Heus + Bel Ga engagement that continue to shape how Arcus approaches multi-site rooftop solar advisory in 2026, particularly where the engagement involves a distributed MNC customer footprint, institutional-capital-grade contracting standards, or a parent-group sustainability programme that has to be delivered against country-level execution.

1. Multi-site MNC portfolios are won at the contract architecture, not the engineering.

Modular rooftop PV is a settled technology in Vietnam in 2026. Any of a dozen reputable EPCs can build to spec on a feed-mill or hatchery roof. What is not settled, and where the project is actually won or lost, is whether a single contractual wrapper can carry across diverse operating realities — different load shapes, different reliability requirements, different site working protocols — without exploding into a stack of bespoke instruments. For multi-site MNC customers, the architectural decision that matters most is the EOLA template's flexibility envelope, not the inverter brand or the panel make.

2. Distributed agribusiness footprints are a legitimate target market for institutional-capital rooftop platforms.

Most of the institutional-capital rooftop solar conversation up to 2023 was anchored on industrial manufacturing — large, single-site, predictable. The De Heus + Bel Ga build proved out the same EOLA structure across distributed agribusiness — feed mills, genetics farms, hatcheries — with all of the operating diversity that implies. For Vietnamese platforms looking to grow beyond textile and electronics customers, agribusiness, food processing, distributed retail, and similar multi-site footprints are the next logical addressable market, provided the contractual architecture can carry the operating complexity.

3. The parent-group sustainability standards are the real competitive moat — and the work is in the documentation chain.

Royal De Heus could have signed Zero Capex rooftop deals with any number of Vietnamese local C&I solar developers. What CN Green Roof Asia could deliver, and what local developers without institutional-capital backing struggled to match, was a documentation and audit chain that ran cleanly from the construction site in Binh Dinh through to Royal De Heus's group sustainability disclosures in the Netherlands. The IFC-aligned ES&HS framework, the CFM and Norfund annual investor audits, the documented contractor protocols, and the verified generation and CO₂ reporting are not back-office overhead — they are the substance of why a Dutch parent-group procurement function will sign a 20-year EOLA with you instead of with the local builder. Anyone advising clients on cross-border MNC procurement should treat the documentation chain as the deliverable, not as a supporting artefact.