In 60 years, the Soufflet father and son have transformed a small grain business in the Aube into one of the world’s leading maltsters and one of the main French millers and bakers.
His name was indistinguishable from his empire: Michel Soufflet, who built the first French grain trading giant, died on Sunday at the age of 94, we learned on Monday from the InviVo group, which bought Soufflet in 2021. In 60 years, the Soufflets, father and son, transformed a small grain business in the Aube into one of the world’s leading maltsters and one of the main French millers-bakers, with nearly 7,000 employees in 19 countries, from seed to bakery.
Before becoming “the king of grain”Michel Soufflet had made his mark in his native Aube: he took over the small family cereal business in 1957, after the death of his father. “I was a driver, I was the handyman, I was the stopgap, there weren’t many of us at the time, there were seven of us.”Michel Soufflet told AFP in 2018.
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Acquisition by inVivo in 2021
Very quickly, he sought to improve the harvest. At the time, he recalled, “The farmers put the grain in sacks, the sacks in carts with horses and they brought it back to the farm. I realized that if we provided a way to transport the harvest more economically, it would allow us to gain customers.”. He then bought his first dump truck, capable of collecting at the foot of the combine harvester, and created a grain collection and transport service, from the field to the silo, to Rouen – the leading port for grain exports. Soufflet quickly built his first silo, his first malting house, and expanded. In the 1980s, the family business was already among the leading French grain exporters and opened subsidiaries in Western Europe, then in the late 1990s in the East, in Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
Yet fiercely attached to his independence, Michel Soufflet decided with his son, Jean-Michel – at the head of the group since 2001 -, in the absence of a successor, to look for a buyer: they chose to join forces with the union of agricultural cooperatives InVivo, favoring “a French-French solution”This alliance will make InVivo a European giant: its turnover, of 12.4 billion euros in 2022-23, has more than doubled since the acquisition of Soufflet at the end of 2021. InVivo employs 14,500 people, has become the world leader in malt and is active in grain brokerage, the sale of products for farmers, the agri-food sector and distribution with the Jardiland and Gamm Vert stores and the Louise network of artisanal bakeries.
