The tour of the milkman, who placed a bottle of milk on the doormat, is part of a bygone country imaginary. Far from the realities of a sector in crisis (breeders, poorly paid, are crushed by inflation), two brands, Le Fourgon and La Tournée, integrate into the urban landscape the truck that drove from village to village, the one that once , went from the farm to the houses: “Few people knew the milkman, but it existed in the villages, like the brewer who made beer and lemonade and left the bottles at home”, points out Charles Christory, co-founder of the Le Fourgon brand.
This young entrepreneur from Lille is therefore bringing home delivery of sterilized milk in bottles back into fashion (in addition to other liquids, such as water, beer, wine, soups, etc.). The principle: customers order online, receive their bottles in a time slot that they define and then return their bottles to a delivery person for reuse of the bottles. Alas, the milk is not very local: “We searched for eighteen months to find a cooperative capable of bottling sterilized milk in glass, but we only found producers who made pasteurized milk, which can be kept for fourteen days and not several months. We ended up finding a producer of sterilized milk in Ardèche. But we are in discussion with other producers, in other regions of France.
Although the company is only two years old, 500,000 bottles are already delivered and collected every month. Le Fourgon delivers organic semi-skimmed and organic whole cow’s milk, organic whole sheep’s milk and organic whole goat’s milk in the major cities of France (Lille, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Angers, Rennes, etc.) but not yet in Paris. : “It is the place where we circulate the least well in France! But it’s planned for the end of the year. We deliver everything by electric van.” The west of Paris is now supplied by another brand that more or less follows the same principle, La Tournée, which delivers, among other things, free-range or sterilized milk in glass bottles, also consigned according to the principle of reuse.
Information: The Tour, https://la-tournee.co, and The Van, https://www.lefourgon.com.