Définir une stratégie et mettre en place un business modèle social au sein d'une coopérative laitière durable.

Abstract

After a considerable crisis of the dairy sector in 2009, many European farmers had no other choice but to stop practicing their professional activity. Indeed, they were compelled to sell their milk production at a price that was below their production costs. For those who still decided to keep going, the decisions were not easy. They could make enormous investments in order to stay as competitive as possible or they could continue working in overpopulated barns to the detriment of quality. Some others decided not to be dependent on the market price anymore by creating their own initiatives.

Marguerite Happy Cow is a cooperative society established in 2017 that gathers farmers, cheese producers, a fodder manufacturer and also more than sixty citizens. A whole channel is working hand in hand to promote family agriculture, quality milk products and fair incomes for farmers. This cooperative society was first the initiative of one of the cheese producers - Herve Société - in order to safeguard the famous Fromage de Herve that is made following a specific know-how. To do so, the objective was to re-establish contacts with farmers of the Pays de Herve to make them produce quality milk in exchange for a guaranteed fair income.

The current problem is that Marguerite Happy Cow has some difficulties to be totally independent because of the historical place of Herve Société in this structure. Indeed, this cooperative society is composed of several types of actors, not only farmers, and some of them gain unconsciously ascendancy. The aim of the mission was to create a social business model and to give responsibilities to each actor in order to become autonomous financially speaking but also organizationally speaking. One of our main activity was the launch of our first Marguerite Happy Cow product that enabled farmers to identify with it and to recreate contact with the consumer.