Who is Lactalis? The French dairy giant that was born in a village cheese shop and today processes twice the production as

To understand Lactalis, one must go back to 1933, to a small shed in Laval, in western France, where a young producer named André Besnier began making Camembert cheese in an artisanal way. It was a family business, one that starts with a couple of buckets of milk, restless hands, and the obsession to make a better cheese than the neighbor's. Nothing in that scene suggested that, less than a century later, that rural cheese shop would transform into the largest dairy company on the planet. Today, the Lactalis group is an industrial and logistical empire that handles volumes only managed by global food giants. In 2024, it generated 30.300 billion euros, equivalent to about 33.000 billion dollars at the current exchange rate. It processes each year 22.800 million liters of raw milk (twice the total production of Argentina) from thousands of farms and operates 266 industrial plants in 50 countries, with a workforce of 85,500 employees. In much of the world, just glancing at the dairy ...