Inside France's Cheese War

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The cheese war has brought his company, Réaux, 30-35 percent growth. Réaux now makes 20,000 cheeses a week, and an addition to the existing factory is almost complete. "Nevertheless, believe me when I tell you that I would prefer not to have waged this bitter fight," says Gillot. "The peace is gone. We were a family, and now we are enemies. I would like to have avoided this."

Gillot has experienced many a defensive battle over Camembert, and he has been on the winning side each time. In 1985, the upper house of the then West German parliament, the Bundesrat, rejected a bill at the last minute that would have banned the importation into Germany of any cheese made with raw milk. In 1989, after listeria bacteria had been found in Camembert, Great Britain and Japan considered imposing import bans, and in the early 1990s France's cheesemakers went into a panic when the northern member states of the European Union considered making pasteurization mandatory throughout the bloc. Raw milk prevailed each time, and with it Camembert. The cheese had already encountered more powerful enemies than Lactalis and Isigny.

Gillot takes us on a tour of the plant at Réaux, joined by his production manager, Marc Brunet, a friendly-looking man with a mustache, whose business cards are laminated in plastic because he spends so much of his time working in a warm, humid environment. In the cheese dairy, which is the size of two indoor gymnasiums, workers fill the molds and scoop the raw milk out of bulbous ladles. The work resembles that of farm producer Durand, except that 10 people are making cheese at the same time. In fact, this is a factory, only somewhat more charming than ordinary industrial production.

Lacked Sufficient Fighting Capacity

Behind a glass wall, the milk laboratory occupies a series of winding hallways. The laboratory has the appearance of a hospital, complete with instruments, steel cabinets and technical equipment. "Raw milk has become a science," says Brunet. "The constant analyses constitute 10 percent of our costs. And now imagine how much a company like Lactalis has to spend on this and how much it can save without raw milk."

During the course of 2008, Lactalis had to economize, lay off workers and close entire plants in its Camembert de Normandie division. But the damage to its image also jeopardized the company's market share for other brands and other varieties. Last winter, almost two years after the cheese war began, the company began to realize that it lacked sufficient fighting capacity, that it was losing the war, and that the little rebels out in Normandy were still in control. Two years after the war began, Morelon and the Lactalis management realized that it was time to figure out ways to make peace without losing face.

The local mini-war had turned into a "reputation risk" for global player Lactalis. It wasn't that the company was doing poorly. In fact, business is booming, as the company enjoys record sales figures and phenomenal fundamental data. It exports 70,000 tons of Brie a year, as well as 60,000 tons of soft cheese. But Lactalis needs the Normandy Camembert and its aura. The company needs to be able to fall back on the real and authentic, or risk losing credibility, tradition and soul. Culture, not money, is at stake here.

"The modern consumer has become more sensitive," Morelon said back when he still believed in victory. "The customer is more critical today," he said, "he wants product safety, and he wants health." But he was already speaking against his better judgment, against the reality in a country whose residents are not deterred by a few bacteria when they want to slurp down oysters and raw periwinkles, when they mix raw meat with raw eggs to make steak tartare and when they bite into raw milk cheese as if it were a piece of bread. Morelon was in denial of defeat, refusing to resign himself to the inevitable.

The inevitable occurred in mid-January, 22 months after the beginning of this war. Although it was essentially about cheese, it was in fact about so much more. Isigny, the cooperative by the sea, located between the sites of the Allied landings at Utah and Omaha beaches, has given up. Its explanation was brief: "We are returning to raw milk and the Camembert Charter, which is also the historic legacy of our work."

Lactalis and its spokesman, Morelon, announced that they too were "considering" a return to the large-scale production of raw milk Camembert, and now plan to restart production this spring. It is a capitulation. It is a brilliant victory. And just as is in fairy tales, good, for once, prevails: a cheese that is the only true Camembert de Normandie.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

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