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The independent cheesemaker Pierre Coulon created his cheese dairy in the Norman village known throughout the world where the big industrialists are installed… Extract from the magazine “1:15 p.m. on Saturday” of November 5, 2022.
“Raw milk is super important because that’s how good cheese has been made for nearly 3,000 years, and I don’t work with pasteurized milk cheese because it’s not my culture. We make a Normandy camembert with raw milk, an appellation camembert.This is all the more important for us as the camembert was almost pasteurized. Regularly, the major dairy groups try to pass the pasteurization of Camembert de Normandie in the regulations”, explains cheese maker Pierre Coulon to the magazine “1:15 p.m. on Saturday” (replay).
“It would allow them to increase their volumes and also to switch their classic range to the ‘Fabriqué en Normande’, ‘AOP’ [Appellation d’origine protégée]. We are against! Camembert de Normandie must absolutely remain with raw milk. And my voice is as important as that of a big band”specifies the one who created in Paris a social and solidarity dairy in which partners and employees receive the same salary. He has just opened his cheese dairy in the very village of Camembert…
“Cheese is a farm, artisanal, independent production”
Maintaining raw milk in the AOP label is the last of the battles, because 95% of camemberts sold in France are made with pasteurized milk. By settling in the village with a name known throughout the world, the cheese maker who pays the producers twice as much for his milk as the usual price puts on the costume of David facing Goliath: “Cheese is diversity, it’s a farm, artisanal, independent production. And in this symbolic village, we have large groups.”
Lactalis, the king of industrial cheese, reigns over Camembert. He displayed his flagship brands there, a few steps from the church, owned the Camembert House and had a cheese factory built in the village twelve times larger than that of Pierre Coulon: “I don’t want to leave them the whole thing, what! It’s out of the question!”
> Replays of France Télévisions news magazines are available on the Franceinfo website and its mobile application (iOS & Android), “Magazines” section.