2023-12-15 23:09:24
No one would have bet an egg or a pound of butter on the Jeannette biscuit factory in 2013. The company located in Colombelles in Calvados had just been liquidated and we could not see by what miracle this cradle of the famous madeleine au taste of our childhood could well have been saved.
This was without taking into account the visceral attachment of employees to their biscuit factory. “Some of us had spent 35, sometimes 40 years here. But it wasn’t just that. There was an atmosphere here, a family that this madeleine symbolizes. It was impossible for us to imagine that it would stop. I came back there when I was 16, and I always saw madeleines on my mother’s table. It’s close to our heart,” says Marie-Claire Marie, a former “Jeannette” emblematic of the fight waged by the employees.
“The women stayed during the day and the men at night…”
During this pivotal year of 2013, when everything seemed lost, she actually participated, for 344 days, in blocking the company.” “We stayed day and night without interruption. The women worked during the day and the men at night, to prevent the bailiffs or the gendarmes from entering, in case…” remembers André, another employee. And after a year of struggle, the company found a first buyer in 2015, then a second in 2019.
Ten years later, the crazy bet has been won. The company’s 24 employees today have made it possible to double its turnover to 4 million euros. “We are aware every day of what we owe to our elders. And it’s a strength that we constantly draw on to continue to develop our company,” says Martinet, the company’s general manager.
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