In Vigen, in New Aquitaine, Claire Bernard and Gaël Le Coz are farmer-bakers, producing the wheat used to make the bread they sell. Brut went to meet them.
“Three years ago, we put our bread at €4.70 per kilo and today, it’s been three years and our bread is still at €4.70 per kilo.“Gaël Le Coz is a baker, but not only. He works in New Aquitaine, near Vigen. With Claire Bernard, they are also farmers, since they themselves produce the wheat used to make the bread they sell in the town. A manufacturing that allows them to keep their prices fixed through economic crises, being outside of all these agri-food chains. “I have no intention of increasing it at all, because in fact, I don’t need to increase it. Today, precisely, the interest, for our customers, is that they know that by coming to consume, to buy our bread, they are helping a company which is resilient and which, suddenly, will allow them to always have bread even if we have a crisis as we can see today and which we will surely see more and more in the years to come, what”, adds Gaël Le Coz.
“The objective behind it is to be an agent of change”
They are also more ecological and responsible, operating locally. “When we arrive in the morning, it’s 4:30 am and we make our mixture: flour, water, sourdough, Guérande salt, that’s all we put in our mess. Then it will be put into the wood-fired oven which is right there. And all the wood, in fact, is just sawmill offcuts. I have a sawmill next door.”
All these steps allow them to save money. “We now see bakeries with invoices of €13,000, etc., per month. Our electricity bill for the farm is €270 for our house, our professional activity and the accommodation of our employee who lives on the farm. We feed regarding 300 households, let’s say, a week with bread and we have an electricity bill that is less than many households that even heat their homes with electricity.”, details the farmer-baker.
“Today, we both work on the farm full time and we employ an employee 25 hours a week to help Gaël in the bakery workshop, and we each earn a minimum wage. We manage to take a good 5 to 6 weeks of vacation in the year and we work on average between 35 and 40 hours a week. And that is due to the fact that we transform our products and that we are in direct sales, I think”, explains Claire Bernard. “Being a farmer-baker or being a market gardener is not an end in itself for us. The objective behind it is to be an agent of change”, she concludes.