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Article Excerpt
In March at Lyon's Primavere Salon, devoted to ecology and alternatives, the company Sorbiop had a stand from which it sold organic sherbet and "Ice Green." The sherbet contains fruit grown on the farm; and the "Ice Green" was made of milk prepared from oats. In the midst of stands selling cheese, honey, and herbal teas, the Sorbiop booth symbolized the fact that frozens are gaining ground among French people who seek out organic food.
Organic frozens are increasingly appearing in health food stores, the managers of which once held the view that people who eat organic products want only fresh offerings. In contrast, in hypermarkets, supermarkets, and even freezer centers, the availability of organic frozens does not appear to be growing. Nevertheless, these stores present a proliferation of products that are healthy in ways other than being organic.
Quick Frozen Foods International (QFFI) recently visited four health food stores in Paris and three in Lyon. One outlet in Paris, a small Naturalia, and one in Lyon, a small Eau Vive, don't carry frozens. However, clerks at each shop provided this reporter with the addresses of larger stores in their chains that do sell frozen products. There the majority of products were organic; but the stores also offered some frozen non-organic dietetic products and frozen fish.
Bio Saint Germain, a small and apparently independent unit in the fifth arrondissement, presented frozen food in a single case with a two-part sliding cover. Featured were ice cream, pizza, bread, french fries, and polybags of fruit--all organic. There were also five varieties of pollen front Percie du Sert ("Ciste," Heather, Willow, Chestnut, and Thousand Flowers) each in 250-gram boxes, and a 580-gram patisserie-type cake from Valpiform. The latter, called "Fraisier," or Strawberry, consisted of a light mousse, sponge cake, and strawberry preserves, and was glazed with a mixture of strawberries and syrup.
The store manager was obviously nervous about competition. This writer was told not to write down prices, and not even to open the case. The only option was to purchase some samples--an ice cream on a stick, called "BIG Chocolate Almond" (actually vanilla coated with chocolate and almonds); and a round loaf of bread, "Pain Integral Bio," with natural leavening from a bakery in the Paris area. The check-out clerk offered to substitute a fresh loaf of bread, saying that the store receives the bread fresh front the bakery and, to avoid wasting product that is not sold the first day, freezes it for later sale.
BioCoop Glaciere in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, the largest and obviously the most thriving of the stores QFFI Visited, sported a single upright freezer cabinet with glass doors. The narrow cabinet was far from full. In fact, quite a few of the price tags referenced items nowhere to be seen. That appeared to reflect a tendency of the small stores to stock more frozens in warm weather than in cold.
The BioCoop is one of 250 stores in a chain of cooperatives across France. Turnover for the group in 2005 was 200 million euros, an increase of 15%, making...
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