Son slogan “Legal taste” will forever be associated with the deep and vibrant voice of Johnny Hallyday who, dressed all in black in his dressing room, extolled the merits of the Normandy coffee brand in a famous advertising spot in the early 1990s.
Thirty years later, Cafés Legal are set to disappear. The Paris commercial court declared the company’s liquidation on Tuesday, December 17, putting an end to coffee production in the Le Havre factory and leaving its 110 employees in the lurch. A real shock for the Normandy region, which has seen this roasting site flourish for more than one hundred and seventy years.
Cafés Legal were placed in receivership at the beginning of October. The Normandy regional council, anxious not to see this heritage company, established in Le Havre since 1851, disappear, had guaranteed the deposit of one million euros to maintain the activity during the procedure. That wasn’t enough.
Two buyouts in two years
Two months later, the Paris commercial court pronounced the dreaded sentence: the permanent shutdown of the production site. The magistrates ruled that the only takeover offer put on the table was not serious enough to ensure the sustainability of the company. After two takeovers in the last two years, the company had already failed to recover its sales and establish itself against the giants of the sector, in a complicated context of historic rise in coffee prices.
In 2022, the family SME made a quick transition into the hands of businessman Michel Ohayon (owner of Camaïeu, Galeries Lafayette, La Grande Récré, Go Sport, etc.), who claimed to want to open an agri-food branch within her band Hermione People & Brands. Faced with the difficulties of ready-to-wear brands, the liquidation of Camaïeu, and the overindebtedness of his group, the Bordeaux billionaire quickly separated from this new activity.
In 2023, it is the FNB investment fund, specializing in agri-food SMEs and buyer of Mousseline purees, which will take over the Cafés Legal activity and its managers are optimistic. “We are proud to be able to support a French heritage brand that has almost 175 years of existence. The company has real strengths and is growing in all of its market segments,” declared Valérie Lutt and Olivier Marchand, partners in this Private Equity fund. The brand’s traditional logo, red and gold, and the brand’s slogan have been changed to highlight the local roots in Le Havre.
Historic rise in coffee prices
The desire of the FNB fund was to increase sales in supermarkets, to make Cafés Légal “the biggest of the small players in the sector” and defend its market share alongside multinationals like Nestlé (Nescafé, Nespresso), JDE (L’or, Jacques Vabre) or Lavazza. In 2023, the brand represented 2.3% of supermarket coffee sales.
Last year, Cafés Legal still had a turnover of 60 million euros and produced around 20,000 tonnes of roasted coffee each year. Over the years, the brand, which had its greatest success in the 1990s, had been able to adapt to numerous market developments, notably by starting to manufacture coffee in capsules and pods.
But the century-old company has taken the brunt of the unprecedented surge in coffee prices in 2024, with an increase of 75% in one year. So last November, the price of Arabica coffee, the most consumed variety worldwide, reached its record level for almost fifty years, at $3.20 per pound, more than €6.50 per kilo. A context which did not favor a third takeover.
“Despite the company’s strong activity in recent months, in a difficult period marked by a historic rise in coffee prices, no recovery solution has been successful,” thus deplored the brand in its official press release following the announcement of its liquidation.
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