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  Camembert Clash: The French Cheese Wars

Camembert Clash The French Cheese Wars

By Ullrich Fichtner

Part 2: Losing the Battles, Losing the War

The wheels of cheese turn snow-white after three weeks, each of them an original, each one different from the next, a delicate ivory color inside, generously creamy, each revealing its strength when tasted. One can still taste the sweetness of the cow's milk in the finished cheese, as its nutty flavor and mineral overtones waft across the tongue, dispensing the delicate flavors of wildflowers and ocean breezes.

It is a taste sensation that no industrial Camembert can deliver, that no cheese made from pasteurized, thermized and micro-filtered milk can provide. Compared with Durand's hand-made wheels of cheese, cheap supermarket products taste like doorstops. Only Camembert made with raw milk can contain the texture and character of the landscape where the cows graze, what the French call "terroir," a word that also conveys a sense of home. François Durand, who has been working with raw milk for the past 20 years, knows how many different variations exist. He knows how different cheese tastes if it is made in the summer or the spring, or during prolonged periods of rain or dry weather.

"Norman Camembert from treated milk," says Durand, "cannot exist. It's a contradiction." He is standing in his farm store, wearing a white rubber apron and rubber boots, a milky haze coating his glasses. During lunch, construction workers from the neighborhood come to his store to pick up one or two Camemberts to eat, but Durand has to disappoint them. His cheese is sold out and his storage rooms are empty. The same thing happens every day now. Now that the big producers have stopped making Camembert, the demand far outstrips the supply. Did he end up benefiting from the Camembert war? "It certainly didn't hurt me," says Durand, "but it did hurt others."

After Lactalis decided to get out of the raw milk Camembert business, sales plunged at Lepetit, its flagship operation, so much so that the once-proud cheese factory in Saint Maclou had to be shut down in September 2008. The French papers published major obituaries for the company, founded in 1884 by Auguste and Léontine Lepetit, whose products won 60 gold and silver medals during the 20th century at France's annual General Agricultural Competition (CGA).

'Vicious Polemics'

Lactalis spokesman Morelon should have known then that it was an unwinnable war, but he believed steadfastly in victory and continued to write his over-the-top press releases. "The violent nature of the attacks waged against us," he wrote, "has raised doubts among consumers and ruined the (Lepetit) brand." He failed to mention that the renunciation of raw milk could have led to the bankruptcy, and that the French people, his customers, were unwilling to support the company and did not believe its PR message. Morelon dismissed a Lepetit heir's comment that Lactalis had betrayed tradition and was now paying the price as "vicious polemics."

But Lactalis lost every battle in this war and Morelon lost the fight for the hearts and minds of customers, as the news coming in from all sides became steadily worse. The relevant government agencies reinforced the existing Camembert Charter, the media celebrated the victory of tradition, and in their stories they likened the dispute to the battles between Asterix and Rome, David and Goliath, local heroes and global players. Soon after that, serious scientific studies were released that declared raw milk Camembert to be safe in every respect, including hygiene.

At town festivals in Normandy, mayors and local celebrities publicly and demonstratively consumed the real Norman cheese, and within a short time clubs that had been formed to defend the raw milk tradition had collected 20,000 signatures. Restaurant chefs signed cheese petitions, the magazine Gourmet ran special stories about Camembert, and the small Camembert producers pooled their finances to hire a lawyer in Caen who, in 100 hours of work, wrote up a new set of bylaws for their association. They eventually managed to outvote Lactalis and Isigny, which combined had previously held the majority of votes, in the French cheesemakers' association.

Morelon became familiar with the military adage that those who must defend everything are able to defend nothing. During the interview in the Tour Montparnasse, when winter was at the door and he still believed in victory, he hid his wounds behind caustic humor and raged against the well-heeled Paris intellectuals, against the journalists who, he said, had no concept of normal life. "Our biggest mistake," Morelon said, "was to let the television stations in." Journalists from the France 3 television channel had visited Lactalis and a short time later a vicious documentary about the cheese war was aired. "I'm sure you know it," said Morelon, "the old French chanson about the little ones fighting the big ones." With their backs against the wall, Lactalis and Morelon decided to switch from conventional war to guerrilla tactics. The company began testing their small competitors' products in its own laboratories to search for malicious bacteria. On Oct. 11, the Lactalis laboratory technicians found what they were looking for. Morelon issued a press release, as he had done in the past, to announce that Lactalis had "informed the authorities about bacteria found in the products of a competitor."

A Sore Loser

The report concerned some impurities found in a batch of 5,500 pieces of "Saint Loup" cheese. An independent test failed to confirm the Lactalis laboratory's findings, but the damage to the competitor's image had been done, and a new wound had been opened. Morelon called it an act of "self-defense," but in truth it was nothing but another lost battle. By then he was being attacked from all sides -- in Normandy, in Paris and throughout France -- as a denunciator. The attacks were filled with a sense of outrage over what citizens viewed as the moral decline of a sore loser.

"This is an outrageous case," says Bertrand Gillot, CEO of Fromagerie Réaux, founded in 1931 and located in the seaside town of Lessay. Gillot, a vigorous man in his late 60s, the scion of a famous Norman cheese dynasty, is wearing a light blue, V-neck sweater, and a tie covered with fox terriers. "The times are not what they used to be," he says. "In the past, great men were in charge at Lactalis, honest businessmen. Today financial brokers are at the helm, jugglers. It isn't pretty anymore."

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